Subject: [AAA-DOCTORS] FW: Internal WG Review: Yet Another Mail (yam)

From: "Romascanu, Dan (Dan)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:11:58 +0200

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
IESG Secretary
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 12:01 AM
To: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Internal WG Review: Yet Another Mail (yam) 

A new IETF working group is being considered in the Applications Area. 
The draft charter for this working group is provided below for your
review and comment.

Review time is one week.

The IETF Secretariat

Yet Another Mail (yam)
----------------------------------
Last Modified: 2009-04-29

Current Status: Proposed Working Group

Chair(s):

<TBD>

Applications Area Director(s):

Lisa Dusseault <[email-masked]>
Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>

Applications Area Advisor:

<TBD>

Mailing Lists:

http://mipassoc.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-yam

Description of Working Group:

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 for which the community already has some years of
experience with deployment and interoperability. Its function is not to
reopen or reconsider protocols - if a specification is found to need
significant technical work, YAM will remove it from the WG's agenda.

This charter's scope of work is the set of email-related RFCs that are
currently at Draft Standard. Each document will be examined, along with
its errata, and a recommendation made as to whether it is suitable for
advancement to Full Standard. If it is not, the WG may recommend whether
it should be republished at Draft Standard, moved to Historic, or
recycled to Proposed Standard. However, any actual work to facilitate
publication of a document at other than Full Standard is outside the
WG's scope. If the WG cannot quickly reach consensus about further work
on a document, it will drop the documents from its agenda without
further comment or effort.

The purpose of this working group is to work on protocols that are
already recognized as effectively full standards, improving their
written specifications to align with that status. The working group does
not intend to revise the actual protocols in any way and will avoid
document changes that might even accidentally introduce protocol
changes, destabilize a protocol, or introduce semantic or syntactic
changes.

In particular, it will avoid adding new document sections that were not
previously required and making gratuitous BNF grammar changes. If an
existing protocol implementation is conforming to the Draft Standard
version of the protocol specification, it must also be conforming to the
resulting Full Standard version. Hence, specification changes that
create a violation of this requirement are out of scope of the working
group charter.

On a case by case basis, substantive changes may be considered, if they
will modify text to match existing conforming implementations -- that
is, implementations that are already deployed with significant use.
Specifically, such changes will be permitted to relax requirements (such
as changing a MUST to a MAY) or to fix BNF bugs where the intent is and
has been clear. In any event, agreement will be reached with the IESG
about the changes to be made to a given document before work starts on
it

After the tasks of this charter are completed, the WG will consider
rechartering to move selected mature specifications that are still at
Proposed Standard to higher maturity levels, or to work on those
documents previously identified as needing to be republished at Draft
Standard or Proposed Standard.

The underpinnings of this WG effort are:

(1) Wide deployment and use of interoperable implementations of an
existing standards-track protocol creates a presumption that the
existing specification is adequate. The burden of demonstrating the
contrary lies with those who believe that they see significant technical
or documentation defects.

(2) It is generally in the best interest of the IETF and the Internet
community to see specifications of mature protocols advance on the
standards track, eliminating any uncertainty as to whether the protocols
have been adequately understood and tested. To that end, YAM will avoid
modification of documents simply to adjust them to match contemporary
IETF procedural, section list, notational or linguistic norms.
Obviously, updating of references, boilerplate, and the equivalent are
exceptions to this, but success in the WG requires that there be a
good-faith commitment by both its participants and the IESG to avoid
seeking changes that (a) do not contribute in a substantial and
substantive way to the quality and comprehensibility of the
specification, or that (b) force a change to the existing protocol.

-------------------

Benchmarks (dates to be determined)

Compile a list of potentially-relevant documents. The list of documents
that are now at Draft Standard that appear to be email related is as
follows. Per the next benchmark, some of these are not likely to be
considered by the WG, nor does order of publication imply order of
importance.

<TBD>

The steps to be followed are, approximately:

o Review the document list, removing any that have significant technical
defects or whose advancement may be controversial under the advancement
criteria specified in RFC 2026.

o Form review and editing teams for each document to be advanced.

o Formulate a list of proposed changes (stated in general terms, rather
than specific wording).

o Obtain WG consensus and IESG agreement on these changes.

o Post I-Ds for WG consideration and consensus formation.

o Recommend resulting documents to IESG for publication processing.

o Rinse and repeat.

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 08:33:23 +0300

I am very much in favor of this, and its about time we do it. I like the 
wording and scoping of the charter.

I would like to see the TBD list of documents filled out, however. If we 
believe this WG is needed we should already know what the tentative list 
of documents is. And in any case its easy to write up.

Jari

Romascanu, Dan (Dan) wrote:
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