Call for Consensus: Moving HTTP/3, QPACK and Recovery to the Late-Stage Process

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

Previously, we've moved to the 'late-stage process' documented at [1] for the Transport and TLS drafts. The chairs and editors now feel that it's time to move the Recovery, HTTP/3, and QPACK drafts to that process as well.

As before, this is because we're getting to a stage we feel the documents would benefit from slower and slightly more formal process, so that the rate of change is not so high, changes that do occur are well-vetted, and the documents get closer to reflecting consensus in the working group.

If we do this, we're saying that we have gained consensus on what remains in these documents, excepting their outstanding issues. As per our charter:

"""
Note that consensus is required both for changes to the current protocol mechanisms and retention of current mechanisms. In particular, because something is in the initial document set does not imply that there is consensus around the feature or around how it is specified.
"""

That doesn't mean that new issues can't be raised against those drafts. However, new issues against them will be judged for whether they contain new information (in particular, security or interoperability impact), a clear technical defect, or have significant (in the judgement of the chairs) support for further discussion. If the issue isn't well-described or atomic, it may be closed with a request to refactor, or refactored for you.

Again, this does not affect editorial issues.

Practically speaking, it means that new issues will be triaged by the Chairs -- not the editors (although they can still "claim" purely editorial issues) -- and those that don't meet the criteria above will be closed. Those that do will be labeled (again, by the Chairs only) as `design`.

It also means that all of the closed `design` issues against these drafts will be marked as `has-consensus`. Additionally, the `quicv2` issues against them will be closed and marked `has-consensus`.

The issues that will be labeled `has-consensus` (and closed, if still open) are listed here:
  
https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+label%3Adesign+-label%3Ahas-consensus+-label%3A-transport+-label%3A-tls

We believe that all of these issues have been discussed and the group has formed consensus on them; this only formalises that.

If you have concerns or questions, please discuss them on-list; barring pushback, we'll adopt this on 15-Nov-2019.

Cheers,

1. https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#late-stage-process

--
Mark and Lars, QUIC WG Chairs