Re: [yam] Referencing 1652bis and update to RFC 5321/5322

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Tuesday, June 29, 2010 17:09 +0300 Jari Arkko
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> Dave,
> 
>> If the proposal being promoted by Russ is chosen, then
>> there's nothing  for this wg to do: everything that is a
>> candidate for the wg should  automatically already be at the
>> final level. No?
> 
> I would hope that the YAM working group exists to improve the
> e-mail related RFCs. 

Actually, the YAM WG exists --I'm inclined say "solely"-- to
advance these documents to Full Standard.   Quoting the from
first two sentences of the charter:

	"The Yet Another Mail (YAM) WG will revise existing
	Internet Mail specifications currently at Draft Standard
	to advance them to Full Standard. YAM will focus
	strictly on advancing email-related specifications..."

> I'm not sure about these specific RFCs,
> but in general, I at least see often small issues here and
> there, there's usually some filed errata, and we've learned
> over the years to understand some issues better. While all of
> these issues are small (as evidenced by global deployment of
> this technology), I still think they are worthwhile to handle.
> In short, while the edits will probably be small, I think it
> is our duty at the IETF to maintain our specifications.

Sure.  The difficulty lies at the intersection of "duty" with
"resources", "motivation", and "priorities".  Your observations
about small issues, errata, and improved understanding can be
applied to almost any standards-track RFC.  As an extreme
example, there are certainly enough small issues, updates, and
improved understanding to justify updates/replacements for RFC
768 and/or RFC 793 yet, "duty" aside, we have not done that.

> For instance, I looked at
> draft-ietf-yam-5321bis-smtp-pre-evaluation and all the
> suggested changes make sense to me (irrespective of what
> labels we might be using to name the resulting RFCs).

Sure.  They make sense to me too.  Whether they make enough
sense to justify the editorial effort, the efforts by the WG to
be sure that any changes are made correctly and don't have
side-effects, etc., is really the question, not whether the
document can be made better with another editing pass (in the
case of 5321bis, the third such pass if one counts from 2821 and
a somewhat higher number if one goes further back -- there is
still some unchanged 821 text in 5321).

I note that the thesis of draft-housley-two-... can be
interpreted as "one revision after the original spec is
worthwhile, but more than one isn't worth the effort".  I don't
happen to believe that, and I'm keenly aware of the fact that
errata, even "approved" errata, do not constitute community
consensus documents, but, if the IESG does, then YAM is pretty
worthless even though the documents themselves (again, like
almost all other documents the IETF has produced) could be
improved.

    john