Re: Maintenance WG: ent of Selections

[Joel Halpern <[e-mail]>]

With regard to maintenance, the two areas I am most active in each have 
enough maintenance that having one WG for all the maintenance (in each 
area) simply would not work.  IDR, LSR, and MPLS for Routing.  6man 
(which is even named as a maintenance group) and DHC (and probably even 
some of the others) in Internet.

Yes, the IETF used to have a policy against long lived working groups. 
We found it didn't work.

Yours,
Joel

On 1/28/2021 11:22 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 7:05 PM Fred Baker <[e-mail] 
> <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> 
>     So voila! IPv4 has existed more than ten years, so we don’t need it
>     any more... Also DNS, DHCP, TCP, Ethernet, SMTP - wow, that rule
>     really clears the deck. And heck - even IETF chairs produce internet
>     drafts.
> 
> 
> Quite. This leads me to re-suggest a proposal I have made from time to 
> time which is that every area have a DISPATCH working group and every 
> area also have a maintenance group.
> 
> This has (sorta) happened in security with LAMPS. Faced with the need to 
> update cipher suites across the board, a new WG was formed which has 
> been tweaking every protocol in active use not in active development.
> 
> The objection generally raised is of course that this allows people to 
> 'mess' with existing protocols adding features that shouldn't be there. 
> But that objection presupposes that the job of the IETF is to control 
> permission for permissionless innovation.
> 
> One of the reasons some WGs linger is that their function requires 
> continuous tweakage, GSSAPI/KITTEN being an example. Better to have one 
> WG with the purpose of lingering than four lingering past their sell-by.
> 
>