Re: Status of this memo [WG consensus]

[Theodore Ts'o <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 11:16:14AM +1200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> 
> Actually, no. It only reflects consensus to work on the topic with
> draft in question as a basis. It does not imply that the WG will
> reach rough consensus on the draft. It is not uncommon for adopted
> drafts to fade away, fail to reach WG Last Call, or fail to reach WG
> consensus after WG Last Call. As Martin says downthread, it's only
> when the draft is sent off to the AD that we can be sure that the WG
> chairs have called consensus.

It should also be noted that not all I-D's are proto-RFC's.  There are
cases, in more complex protocols, where an wg I-D might contain some
secondary text that might explore potential (non-normative) use cases,
or possible alternate approaches (which if adopted might replace
several sections or subsections of the primary I-D), etc.  In those
cases, the I-D introduction would explain what the purpose of that I-D
might be, and in the end, some, all or none of that text might *ever*
show up in a published RFC.

Perhaps that's less common now, because people can just throw up that
sort of thing on their blog, or a medium or substack post, etc.  But I
think there is value, if there is a document that is useful to the
working group's consideration, for it to be posted as an I-D for that
working group, without any kind of presumption that it's going to end
up as a standard or some other kind of RFC.  Other standard groups
(the T13 ZONE DOMAINS effort was my most recent experience of this)
have similar types of never-intended-to-be-normative documents used in
the process of the work of standardization, so this is by no means
unique to the IETF.

Cheers,

					- Ted