Re: [ietf-provreg] a question for the list

[Andrew Sullivan <ajs@shinkuro.com>]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 09:48:18PM -0500, Michael Young wrote:
> I second James' questions here, I am not sure a WG is required at this point
> but I'd like to see a proposed charter draft as a first step.

It seems to me that one of Ed's observations might have been a bit too
subtle for some who are less attuned to the IETF processes, so I
thought I'd try to make it more plain.

The DNSEXT WG has as one of its explicit current chartered work items
to move a very long list of RFCs along the standards track.  Whenever
this comes up for review, people nod sagely, say it's all very
important, and say that it should be a charter item.  Yet the moving
along in the standards track seems not to happen.  Very few DNS RFCs
are at the level of STANDARD.  For instance RFC 2181, easily among the
most important of the DNS RFCs I'd expect anyone interested in the
topic to have read, is only at Proposed Standard.  RFC 1982, Serial
Number Arithmetic -- a terribly influential RFC even outside the DNS
-- also stopped at PS.  IXFR is still PS (RFC 1995), as is Notify
(1996).  I could go on, but I guess you get the picture.

By contrast, without any WG and without a great deal of fanfare, EPP
has become an Internet Standard.  I remember confidently predicting at
one point in the past that EPP could never be a Standard because the
community was simply too small.  I am delighted to have been wrong.

So, before anyone produces a draft charter, I'd like to know what
problem we have that is actually going to be solved.  Never mind
charters and so on: if nobody has been interested enough in
documenting their extensions that they've bothered to write an
individual submission Internet Draft, what problem of any conceivable
interest will be solved by spinning up the considerable machinery
necessary actually to charter a working group?  Or, to put this more
negatively, what possible reason is there for me not to stand up in
the BOF and say, "There are no individual drafts, there is no real
problem to be solved here, and therefore setting up a WG is a waste of
the Area's time,"?  

None of this is to say I don't think there's work to be done (or do
think there's such work).  What I think instead is that, if one wants
a WG, one had better have at least prima facie evidence of an
interested community.  So if people are interested, let's see some
drafts.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
List run by majordomo software.  For (Un-)subscription and similar details
send "help" to ietf-provreg-request@cafax.se