Re: [Sidrops] WG Last Call for draft-ietf-sidrops-cms-signing-time-04

[Russ Housley <[e-mail]>]

>> Title: On the use of the CMS signing-time attribute in RPKI Signed Objects
>> 
>> Authors: J. Snijders and T. Harrison
>> 
>> Datatracker: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-sidrops-cms-signing-time/
>> 
>> Should the SIDRops WG ask the IESG to publish this document as a Standards-Track RFC?  Please respond to this WG Last Call by 5 February 2024.
> 
> I support publication.
> 
> However, I am not sure… but the informative references to "I-D.ietf-sidrops-prefer-rrdp” and "I-D.timbru-sidrops-publication-server-bcp” could pose a dependency problem?
> 
> I need to talk to my co-authors about the first and see if we can agree on a next step. I asked the chairs for a working group adoption call for the second. In any case, neither document is expected to be ready for last call soon.
> 
> So, my question then is whether it’s okay to keep references to specific document versions as work in progress, or that this (cms-signing-time) should wait (not preferred), or that the references should be removed?

I see no concerns with [I-D.ietf-sidrops-prefer-rrdp].

However,  [I-D.timbru-sidrops-publication-server-bcp] is in the same sentence as a SHOULD statement.  Some IETF Last Call reviewers might expect a normative reference.  I think this can be avoided as follows:

   To avoid needless re-transfers of unchanged files in consecutive
   rsync synchronizations, [I-D.timbru-sidrops-publication-server-bcp]
   recommends the use of so-called 'deterministic' (normalized)
   timestamps for files. When the content of a file is unchanged,
   Publishers SHOULD ensure that the last modification
   timestamp of the file remains unchanged as well.

Russ