Re: draft-housley-two-maturity-levels

[[e-mail]]

> On 10/27/2010 8:53 AM, [e-mail] wrote:
> > three level is one level too many. Simplifying things and
> > eliminating process clutter is helpful in and of itself.

> By my reading of the proposal, this means that any spec with a couple of
> interoperable implementations can become a (full) Internet Standard.

That's effectively the case already. Check out the language in RFC 2026 section
4.1.3 -  it talks a bit about "significant" implementation and "successful"
operation, but imposes no concrete metrics the way the move to draft does.

What this translates to in practice is as long as there's a constituency asking
for advancement and the proposal has no obvious shortcomings, the move from
draft to full tends to be high on nuisance value and low on everything else.

> This means that the assignment of that final status has nothing to do with
> real-world deployment and use, or even inclusion in products.

> In other words, it has nothing to do with demonstrated utility.

Well, the implicit claim here is that our present process is making these sorts
of checks. In this regard, I think a comparison of the list of full standards
with the list of draft standards is in order to see if there's a marked
increase in utility associated with advancement, and to put it mildly, I don't
think the results of that comparison provide much support for your argument.

> Is that really what the IETF community wants?

I'm quite sure that in the abstract the IETF wants to only advance
specifications that are free from serious defect and which have demonstrable
utility. The question is whether or not the current draft->full process step is
providing suffficient benefit to be worth the cost. Unfortunately, I think the
answer to that is a pretty clear "no".

				Ned