Subject: Tighter admission policy for I-Ds (was: blank!)

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 00:36:05 -0500

I'm not the IETF list interpreter (by any stretch of the imagination), but I
understood Vern's quote as a two-parter:

- Why would an AD willing to sponsor a BOF not also be willing to sponsor
the I-D that leads TO the BOF?

- Why would an AD willing to sponsor a BOF not also be willing to sponsor
the I-D that comes OUT OF the BOF?

Randy answered the second question, which was one of the choices, and
answered it in a reasonable way, but the first question seems to be more
relevant to this discussion (and WHY are we having this discussion with a
blank "Subject:" on this thread? but that's another story, I guess).

As long as I'm typing, John Stracke expressed the view that having ADs be
the admission point for the thousand-or-so individual I-Ds doesn't scale
well, and that may be true. What if the criteria was 

(1) an existing working group is willing to sponsor it (although not as a
workgroup deliverable), or

(2) an AD was willing to sponsor a BOF on the I-D, or

(3) an AD was willing to sponsor the I-D?

With the usual appeals (IESG, IAB, NONCOM) for those I-Ds that are so
brilliantly visionary that NONE of the 150-250 people in these categories
can appreciate them?

And, backing up slightly - Charlie Perkins pointed out that MobileIP is
still benefitting from I-Ds done years ago, that never made it to RFC
status. (yeah, this was in another thread, but that's what happens when
people leave the subject blank!). Let me ask the question again - what about
requests to publish an I-D directly as Historical? Charlie's "Hierarchical
Foreign Agents" I-D seems like the CLASSIC I-D with interesting ideas that
was abandoned for a while - if the WG chairs for MobileIP said "we think
this version of this I-D is worth keeping around, but we don't want anyone
to think it was FINISHED", would this be wrong (modulo marketing misuse of
"RFC anything")?

I keep going back to this - automatic archiving of I-Ds forces us to either

(1) keep every version of the I-D, so that the person looking for nuggets
gets to look under several rocks, or

(2) keep the most recent version of the I-D, even though this wasn't the
most interesting (I still think the Wide-Area SLP I-D was amazing in version
00, but the SLP group said "cut it down to something we can discuss in less
than a full IETF slot" - so version 01 was about 1/3 as long).

If someone says "THIS version of THIS I-D is worth keeping", that puts a lot
fewer trees in the forest...

Spencer

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Randy Bush [SMTP:[email-masked]]
> Sent:	Friday, August 20, 1999 9:00 PM
> To:	Vernon Schryver
> Cc:	[email-masked]
> Subject:	Re: RE:
> 
> > Why would an AD willing to sponsor a BOF not also be willing to sponsor
> > the I-D that leads to or comes out of the BOF?
> 
> because they did not support the outcome, did not feel it had consensus,
> ...
> 
> if the outcome of a bof was known beforehand, there would be no need to
> have
> it.
> 
> randy
> 
> -
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