Re: draft-housley-two-maturity-levels

[Martin Rex <[e-mail]>]

Scott O. Bradner wrote:
> 
> 1/ I still do not think this (modified) proposal will have any real
>    impact on the number of "Proposed Standard" documents that move
>    to a (in this proposal, "the") higher level since I do not see
>    how this makes any significant changes to the underlying reasons
>    that documents have not progressed in the past - i.e., I see no
>    reason to think that this proposal would change the world much
>    (would not help, would not hurt)

The reason why so many documents are at proposed is that they're
often collections of bloat (limited-use features with an aggresive
requirements level) from various interest groups that is
not strictly necessary for a protocol to be useful, and sometimes
used only by a minority.

Normally, for progression from Proposed to Draft,

   - some of the MUSTs would have to be changed to SHOULDs,
   - some of the SHOULDs would have to be changed to MAYs,
   - some parts might better be moved to seperate, optional
     extensions documents

But the particular interest groups would rather have the document
remain at Proposed than seeing any of the requirements level of
those particular features they're interested in, to come out lowered,
or see features removed from the base protocol and into a
seperate extensions document.


This is one of the reasons why there is a constant stream of new
authentication protocols.


-Martin