Hello, As you will be aware, the base-draft documents comprising QUIC version 1 are making steady progress through the IESG review process. Building from that, we expect the Applicability and Manageability drafts to be stable and fresh, and ready for WG last call soon. Furthermore, we also expect some effort to get directed towards the three adopted extensions: Load Balancers, Version Negotiation, and Datagram.
With the WG nearing the delivery of its first major milestones, we're in a bit of a natural transition period. Now is a good time to look again at the WG charter and consider where else we might choose to direct focus. We anticipate QUIC version 1 to generate interest, deployment experience, and new ideas for extensions. The Chairs and responsible AD would like to position the QUIC WG as the focal point for any QUIC-related work in the IETF, especially with respect to protocol maintenance and evolution. We believe a recharter will make it clear what is in scope for the WG to work on next. Being a focal point, however, does not mean that *all* QUIC-related work should be done in this WG. For example, new application protocol mappings can likely be successfully done in the appropriate ART WG with little interaction required. As you may have noticed, draft-iyengar-quic-delayed-ack, draft-marx-qlog-event-definitions-quic-h3, and draft-thomson-quic-bit-grease have, based on interest to date, been marked as candidates for adoption by the WG. However, our current charter prevents us from formally adopting such work. The intention of the new charter is, among other things, to allow the WG to formally adopt and develop these drafts. The Chairs have worked with the responsible AD and current document editors to prepare a new draft charter for the QUIC WG post version 1. We invite the WG to review this charter at https://github.com/quicwg/wg-materials/blob/recharter/charter/charter.md and file issues or suggestions on GitHub. For convenience, the text as of commit 9471611 is reflected below: QUIC Working Group Charter The QUIC WG originated the specifications describing version 1 of QUIC, a UDP-based, stream-multiplexing, encrypted transport protocol. The WG acts as the focal point for any QUIC-related work in the IETF. It is chartered to pursue work in the areas detailed below. The first area of work is maintenance and evolution of the existing QUIC specifications: - Maintenance and evolution of the QUIC base specifications that describe its invariants, core transport mechanisms, security and privacy, loss detection and recovery, congestion control, version and extension negotiation, etc. This includes the specification of new versions of QUIC, if necessary. - Maintenance and evolution of the specifications of QUIC extensions. Maintenance and evolution work needs to be strongly motivated by existing or ongoing production deployments of QUIC at scale, and needs to carefully consider its impact on the diverse set of applications that have adopted QUIC as a transport. The second area of work is supporting the deployability of QUIC, which includes specifications and documents, such as it applicability and manageability statements, improved operation with load balancers, the specification of a logging format and schemas for QUIC and HTTP/3 endpoints (qlog), etc. The third area of work is the specification of new extensions to QUIC. Extensions intended for Standards Track need to have general applicability to multiple application protocols. The WG may also decide to publish extensions as Informational or Experimental documents, e.g., to allow vendors to publicly document deployed proprietary extensions or to enable wider experimentation with new protocol features. Specifications describing how new or existing application protocols use the QUIC transport layer do not need to be specified in the QUIC WG. The QUIC WG will collaborate with other groups that define such application protocols that intend to use QUIC. New mappings might require QUIC extensions and it may be efficient to define these alongside the mapping specifications. Groups that define application protocols using QUIC, or extensions to QUIC in support of those protocols, are requested to consult with the QUIC WG and seek review of proposals. This is intended to reduce the possibility of duplicate work and/or conflicts with other extensions. The QUIC WG originated HTTP/3, the mapping of HTTP to QUIC, and the QPACK header compression scheme. These specifications are now maintained in the HTTP WG. Defining new congestion control schemes is explicitly out of scope for the WG. However, new QUIC extensions that support development and experimentation with new congestion control schemes may fall under the third work area. Cheers, Lars, Lucas and Matt QUIC WG Chairs
