Re: Status of this memo

[Donald Eastlake <[e-mail]>]

Hi Lars,

On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 4:42 AM Lars Eggert <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2021-4-27, at 11:28, Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > Was there ever any discussion of adopting a more specific formal name for IETF I-Ds, e.g. "IETF draft" ("IRTF draft" etc.)? "Internet-draft" could stay as a rarely used generic umbrella term, but if more precise terms come into common use, clarity will gain a lot.
>
> not that I am aware of. I agree that indicating adoption of a draft via the name (i.e., draft-ietf or draft-irtf) is not something that will be obvious to many people outside the IETF.
>
> > I am also thinking of the difference between adopted IETF drafts and individual submissions; that was completely lost on me until my first several months of active participation, and I am sure that almost all Internet developers and engineers out there miss it too, with the obvious consequence that any "Internet draft" is taken as an official IETF-sanctioned document. It would be better if there were clearly different terms in use for the two types of documents, even better if with different repositories, URL patterns etc.
>
> There was a suggestion recently to not serve I-Ds from ietf.org domains until they were adopted by the IETF. Do you think serving individual drafts from another domain would help make that distinction clearer?

Drafts get copied to other places, forwarded as attachments, etc. I
think originally serving them from a different domain would not be
worth the trouble and would cause confusion not clarity. Besides, I
would still want the datatracker to, by default, search across all
drafts regardless of their adoption status which would seem a bit odd
if, when unadopted, they were coming from example.org or whatever.

Changing the first token in the file name seems much more powerful to
me. Perhaps, to make a clean break, they should be
proposal-lastname-... and wip-wgname-... (or rgname) (wip = work in
progress) or the like so there is no longer anything starting with
"draft-". You might also need an "adopted" type draft name for AD
sponsored drafts and there are other cases...

> There was also a suggestion to add something to the boilerplate text of individual I-Ds along the lines of "anyone can submit an I-D; they have no formal standing until they are adopted by a group in the IETF or IRTF". Would that provide additional clarification?

Sure, seems reasonable to make a change along those lines.

Thanks,
Donald
===============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   [phone] (cell)
 2386 Panoramic Circle, Apopka, FL 32703 USA
 [e-mail]

> Thanks,
> Lars