Re: prerequisite for change (was Re: draft-housley-two-maturity-levels)

Andrew Sullivan <ajs@shinkuro.com> Sun, 30 January 2011 15:32 UTC

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Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 10:35:51 -0500
From: Andrew Sullivan <ajs@shinkuro.com>
To: Keith Moore <moore@network-heretics.com>
Subject: Re: prerequisite for change (was Re: draft-housley-two-maturity-levels)
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On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 10:15:01AM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
> > 
> > That's an argument for _no_ maturity levels, then, not for two.   
> 
> Is there an implicit assumption here that more standards (presumably of poorer quality) is a good thing?

Not on my part.  I'm merely observing that, if the claim is that you
can't alter deployed protocols, then there's no reason to say that we
need two maturity levels, because in fact nothing will advance past
the first stage anyway.

Phillip's description of the state of affairs is consistent with what
we actually see today in a three-maturity-level system: nothing moves
past the first level.  But if the problem is that you can't alter a
deployed spec, then no matter how many levels we pare off past the
first, nothing will move to those higher levels, because it's only the
first level that counts.

I'm not happy about this, note.  I'm just making an observation about
what is entailed by Phillip's description.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.