Subject: [precis] PRECIS profile consistency

From: Peter Saint-Andre - &yet <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 20:46:39 -0600

In his IETF Last Call feedback on draft-ietf-precis-framework (sent 
April 24, 2014), John Klensin wrote in part:

###

(1) After the PRECIS WG task list settled down into its charter
[2], the goal became, in essence, to replace Stringprep with
something more explicitly rule-based and to update (or advise
on) the various uses of Stringprep profiles.  As described in
the PRECIS charter, that approach noted the relationships among
the various parts of the PRECIS work and called for handling the
"framework, profile replacements, and guidelines ... in parallel
as much as possible".  The interrelated nature of the pieces
makes it inappropriate for the IESG to approve the "framework"
document for publication on the standards track at this time
because doing so would foreclose some reasonable discussion of
issues with the other specs -- exactly the situation the charter
language was intended, at least in my recollection, to prevent.
The approval and publication of RFC 6885 over a year ago has
already been used that way.

Some of the decisions reflected in the current draft
illustration why more testing against specific profile examples
and guidelines is important [5].

Recommendation: Tentatively approve the document now if that
seems otherwise justified (I suggest below that it is not) but
do not issue a Protocol Action Notice or handoff to the RFC
Editor until after a sufficient number of of "profile
replacements" and "guidelines" have been completed and examined
through the IETF Last Call process to validate the "framework"
provisions.  The analogy of such a request to "running code"
requirements should be obvious.

###

In an effort to address this concern, I have been working to make all 
three of the existing profile documents consistent with each other and 
with the PRECIS framework:

http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-precis-saslprepbis/

http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-precis-nickname/

http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-xmpp-6122bis/

Although there are still some minor editorial inconsistencies (which I 
am working to address), I would appreciate feedback on these documents 
sooner rather than later. I shall also be contacting the chairs of the 
PRECIS and XMPP WGs about progressing all of these documents soon, so 
that we can make sure the "running code" of the profiles is consistent 
with the theory of the framework.

Thanks,

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://andyet.com/