Subject: [newtrk] Standard Maturity Levels

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 10:40:21 -0600

This week, I saw a document forwarded to IESG deprecating IPv6
site-local, and a reviewer asked why this document needed to be
published as a Proposed Standard. The answer seems to be "to match the
maturity level  of the mechanism being deprecated".

I'm thinking that if we could "get over" this idea, it would be a lot
easier to keep reality in sync with the view of reality we publish to
the world. We've been talking (in a couple of places, not just in
NEWTRK) about how nice it would be if we didn't have to publish an RFC
to move another RFC to Historic, but don't seem to have taken this to
its logical conclusion - if it takes a full Standard to deprecate a
full Standard, we're not going to do this very often.

John Loughney and I were talking in Seoul about the problem we're
creating for people who want to use our standards, but (unfortunately)
haven't participated in the IETF long enough to realize that we're
ignoring the broken parts of our process:

- John just tripped over someone who implemented "Standard TCP" - you
know, STD 7, RFC 793, which has been updated by Proposed Standards,
which aren't part of STD 7, and was even updated by Host Requirements
RFC 1122/STD 3, but that's not the first place people look when they
try to find "the standard for TCP".

- I just tripped over someone who implemented "Standard SMTP" - you
know, STD 10, RFC 821, which has been flat-out obsoleted by Proposed
Standard RFC 2821, which isn't part of STD 10.

So, I have two suggestions for NEWTRK:

- Figure out a mechanism for responsive changes to "what a standard
is", preferably a mechanism that isn't based on publishing another
RFC, but definitely a mechanism that doesn't require publishing a
"matching maturity level" RFC, and

- Go with a single-level standard track - if we're not sure about a
change, Experimental is fine, but if we really think that TCP should
be implemented with congestion avoidance, slow start, window scaling,
timestamps, and SACK, we should be publishing a standard, called TCP,
that actually says all this in one place.

And your thoughts are?

Spencer

p.s. I happen to really like John's "what standards?" draft, and think
it would go a long way towards helping in these areas.

.
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