Re: Evolving Documents (nee "Living Documents") side meeting at IETF105.

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 7/3/19 4:39 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 04:10:13PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
>> On 7/3/19 4:04 PM, Warren Kumari wrote:
>>> TL;DR: Being able to mark a specific version of an *Internet Draft* as
>>> “stable” would often be useful. By encoding information in the name
>>> (stable-foo-bar-00) we can do this.
>>>
>>> Heather and I will be holding a side meeting at IETF 105 to discuss
>>> the idea and get feedback.
>>> When: Tue, July 23, 3:00pm – 4:30pm
>>> Where: C2 (21st Floor)
>> It seems to me that this would defeat the entire purpose of Internet-Drafts
>> and serve to circumvent the IETF process.    There should be no expectation
>> of stability until a document has reached IETF-wide consensus.
> Implementors regularly ship pre-RFC code...

Yes, and it's quite often inappropriate for them to do so, a disservice 
to their customers and sometimes to the whole Internet.

(there are specific cases when doing so is mostly harmless, especially 
if there's a seamless way to upgrade without disruption.... but there 
are many cases for which this is not possible.)

> But this doesn't have to be about shipping prior to RFC publication.  It
> can be just about limiting the impact of future edits on existing code
> that hopefully has not yet shipped anyways.
>
> Now, this can be done _today_ by convention -- you just write in the I-D
> that version starting at version -XX only backwards-compatible changes
> will be entertained.

And in general, it's inappropriate for a WG (or author of a 
standards-track document) to do that before IETF consensus has been reached.

Keith