Re: [tcpm] Thoughts on EXP vs. PS in TCPM

["Scheffenegger, Richard" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Mark,

> On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 8:44 AM Mark Allman <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> And, my take is that the world doesn't much buy there to be a
>> distinction.  I.e., EXP doesn't dissuade general use of something.
>> And, I bet at least part of this is that we're just too conservative
>> with both kinds of RFCs.  If we occasionally did publish an EXP that
>> caused TCP to fall on its face then maybe people would be a bit more
>> careful.

Well, in my world there certainly is a distinction between an RFC in EXP
vs. PS vs STD status... I agree, for those of us who deal with drafts
and RFCs in the transport area, what you state here is correct.

However, I've made the observation, that less well initiated people, in
particular decision makers who can not make a call on the technical
merit, will often simply look at procedural things like the status of a
draft or RFC, when funding or not funding resources to implement and
test them.

This is where I would wish the TCPM would actually have a proper follow
up process, where long-time experimental drafts, which are found to be
safe and beneficial would get re-issued from time to time as PS (and
ultimately STD), and failed experiments get cleaned out. For the latter,
we recently had one such major revisit of the state of various RFC (eg.
rfc6247 and rfc8311 for rfc3540). But IIRC, we very rarely promote RFCs
up from experimental - one recent example with good expirience would be
DSACK RFC3708 here - also due to the many dependencies on it (with one
PS document depending on an EXP document :). RFC793bis is the one
currently in progress here.

IMHO, perhaps whenever the TS Area has two new chairs, that could be
made a more routine maintenance task...