Re: Conclusion of the last call on draft-housley-two-maturity-levels

[Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>]

> 1) Did the IESG consider processing this as RFC 3933 process experiment?

How on Earth could that possibly work?

First, simply the fact of the experiment will almost certainly prompt
people to participate, resulting in a number of specs upgrading from
PS to IS during the experiment... regardless of whether that pattern
would continue afterward.  The experiment would be entirely tainted by
its own existence, and would appear to succeed regardless of whether
the change will actually help in the long term or not.

Second, should we decide that the experiment failed and we do not want
to continue the process change, what happens to all the IS documents
that advanced from PS during the experiment?  Are they rolled back to
DS?  Do they stay at IS?  In the former case, what does that do to
assumptions that had been made on the basis of IS status?  If the
latter case, how is that fair to documents that didn't have the
opportunity to "skip" a rung in the ladder?  And wouldn't that be even
*more* of an incentive for people to push their docs from PS to IS
during the experiment, exacerbating the first effect?

Doing this as a process experiment doesn't make any sense; we either
make this change, or we don't.  And we need to stop wasting time
arguing about it.

Barry