Subject: Re: [iucg] [happiana] unhappIANA

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:22:40 +0200

At 04:58 08/10/2011, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>On 10/7/11 6:49 PM, Frank Ellermann wrote:
>
> > Otherwise four of my five "happIana" experiments worked without any
> > problem; three obsolete header fields are now listed as "obsolete",
> > one non-URI scheme made it from provisional to historic.  The last
> > experiment is tricky, it is about a registry without expert review
> > (FTP commands).
>
>So it sounds as if you are, in general, happy rather than unhappy. If
>so, I'm confused about the subject of your message.

Peter,

As an IETF user, I always had difficulties in figuring out of its 
dedicated RFCs, what are, and how are supposed to precisely work each 
of the different items of the IETF technology. With the IANA being at 
the core of the Internet system, I candidly thought that this list 
would strive to make me and many others happy, in working out a clean 
sheet, exhaustive documentation of the IANA system. I thought that it 
would be a documentation that the IANA could publish and that would 
be kept updated. This could perhaps have served as an example in other areas.

The more things go, from the IANA to IPv6 through IDNA, the more I 
see that what is needed is an Internet tomographic/specification set 
by those having to rely on it:
- "tomographic" for what is to be used on the Internet periphery and 
that IUsers cannot change, what they should therefore consider as 
"IS" or "ARE".
- "specifications" for what MUST, SHOULD, or MAY be used outside of 
the RFC 3935 distributed network scope.

When I read the mails on this list, they mention specific details to 
be reengineered but not the correlated evolution of the architectural 
framework, i.e. they discuss the inside of the IANA black-box process 
and not of the outside cybernetics of the IANA black-box: the 
different registry formats its supports, the creation of a registry, 
the "axfr" of registries, the possible registry structures, the 
registry lookup, the architecture of a distributed IANA, the registry 
administration tools, etc.

I feel the proper solution is to have an architectural framework 
charter (what it is, what it is to do, how it is to be used, what are 
its building principles). It seems that we could get such a framework 
charter from some of the following three sources:

- an IAB guidance that this list might request.
- an IESG charter that this list might propose for a WG/IANA, and 
that the IAB will necessarily review.
- IUsers to request such a guidance or charter or to specify/test 
develop the next-generation IANA.

Is there one this list would favor?
jfc