Re: Last Call: <draft-housley-two-maturity-levels-06.txt> (Reducing the Standards Track to Two Maturity Levels) to BCP

[SM <[e-mail]>]

Hi Russ,
At 07:34 09-05-2011, Russ Housley wrote:
>My person experience with advancing documents is that downrefs are a 
>significant

Thanks for sharing that.

>  hindrance.  As you point out, procedures have been adopted to 
> permit downrefs, but they are not sufficient.  We often see Last 
> Call repeated just to resolve a downref that was caught very late 
> in the process.  These intoduce delay, and they almost never 
> produce a single comment from the community.

This is an extract from the output of Id-nits for draft-ietf-yam-rfc1652bis-03:

  "Checking references for intended status: Proposed Standard

      (See RFCs 3967 and 4897 for information about using normative references
      to lower-maturity documents in RFCs)

      No issues found here."

For what it is worth, the draft was intended for publication as an 
Internet Standard (STD 71).  As I see it, the problem here is that 
"Intended status: Standards Track" is assumed to be "Proposed 
Standard".  As the Document Shepherd runs a draft through Id-nits, he 
or she will not catch the above issue.  It's unlikely that the IETF 
Secretariat will catch the issue.

If down-refs are a process burden (Last Call has to be repeated) and 
the community does not see any value in having that "restriction", 
the IETF could do any with it.  I don't think that would be a good 
idea as it wipes out the notion of maturity levels.

There are a lot of things that do not produce a single comment from 
the community.  They are done for a reason.  For example, there was a 
message about "Draft Secretariat SOW for Community Comment".  There 
has been only one comment on that.  There is a cost to adhering to a 
standard of goodness.  Once you do away with that, it is not as easy 
to get it back.

Regards,
-sm