Re: Things that used to be clear (was Re: Evolving Documents (nee "Living Documents") side meeting at IETF105.)

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

Keith, why would you put “ready for test implementation” after “ready for outside review?”  We want test implementations. These are a great way of finding bugs in the spec. Arguably, there is no point in spending IETF cycles on “outside review” until someone has validated that what is written down is at least implementable by someone who’s been following the work. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 4, 2019, at 1:38 AM, Keith Moore <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> On 7/4/19 1:23 AM, Nico Williams wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> In the security area just about all major Internet protocols are at
>> Proposed Standard.  PKIX?  Proposed Standard.  Kerberos?  Ditto.  TLS?
>> Yup.  SSHv2?  Indeed.  IKEv2?  No, IKEv2 and CMS are among the
>> exceptions, though what good IKEv2 might do anyone w/o ESP, or CMS w/o
>> PKIX, I don't know.
> Yah, I know.  It's hard to get the energy required to move up from PS.
>> Whatever the intention originally might have been, it's certainly long
>> not been the case that one should not deploy protocols that are at
>> Proposed Standard.
> Not sure I agree with that :)  I still think it's unwise to promote deployment before there's been interoperability tests.   But clearly we're not getting that done with our current process.
>> And it's very difficult to stop vendors from shipping pre-RFC protocols.
>> We don't have a protocol police, and we move too slowly.  If we don't
>> adapt, other SDOs will do more of our work.
> yup, it's a race to the bottom :(
>> A big selling point of the
>> IETF is its review processes -- the adults in the room to keep authors
>> from doing dreadful things.  But we need to speed up the cycle somewhat,
>> and one way to do it might be to have a way to indicate expected
>> stability in I-Ds, and probably only in WG work items only, and at some
>> cost (e.g., early directorate reviews?).  I don't quite know -- maybe
>> after reflection we might conclude we shouldn't do this, but we should
>> certainly discuss it, and be able to discuss it.
> 
> So the way we get more review is to encourage deployment even earlier in the draft cycle?  Seems like an odd way to do it.
> 
> But maybe something like this:  What if WGs labeled drafts with "preliminary" (not ready for implementation), "ready for outside review" (after WG thinks the overall shape of the proposal is good, inviting explicit review/feedback from IETF in general and others), "ready for test implementation" (after favorable review and IESG approval), "WG last call candidate" (after favorable implementation and interop tests), and finally "IETF last call candidate"?   Probably not in the doc name itself, but in the tracker, and in the document text when appropriate.
> 
> Keith
> 
>