Re: [sidr] BGPSec RFC status

[Geoff Huston <[e-mail]>]

> On 14 Apr 2016, at 4:17 AM, Stephen Kent <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> I didn't attend the IETF meeting, but I did listen to the Wednesday SIDR session, at
> which the issue was raised as to whether the BGPSec RFC should be standards track
> or experimental.
> 

I was in the room, but did not speak to this topic. 

> I believe standards track is the right approach here.

I consulted the oracle of RFC2026 and read the following:

   A Proposed Standard specification is generally stable, has resolved
   known design choices, is believed to be well-understood, has received
   significant community review, and appears to enjoy enough community
   interest to be considered valuable.  However, further experience
   might result in a change or even retraction of the specification
   before it advances.

This seems to fit well, including the caveats at the end.

On the other hand:

  The "Experimental" designation typically denotes a specification that
   is part of some research or development effort.  Such a specification
   is published for the general information of the Internet technical
   community and as an archival record of the work, subject only to
   editorial considerations and to verification that there has been
   adequate coordination with the standards process (see below).

Which seems to fall short.

The exercise of RFC publication of BGPSec is more than archival, and the process
has been much more than a cursory exercise of coordination with the SIDR WG. While
BGPSec may, or may not, enjoy ubiquitous deployment in tomorrow’s Internet, that
future uncertainty applies to most of the IETF’s work, and that consideration 
should not preclude its publication as a Proposed Standard, as I interpret RFC2026.

Geoff