I'm increasingly seeing a "paradigm" where the review happens _before_
adoption as a WG draft.
and one consequence is that the design gets done outside of the ietf
process.
But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's nice to have reasonably
well thought out ideas come in.
The IETF has a long history of starting efforts from many different
levels of technical maturity.
However there seems to be some recent leadership pressure to change
this, attempting an ad hoc policy, by suddenly choosing to challenge the
importation of existing work apparently based on a spontaneous, personal
belief that it is bad to have IETF start from existing, deployed
specifications.
There is, for example, a difference between saying "given the maturity
and deployment of the document, what is the technical work to be done in
the IETF?" versus "given the maturity and deployment of the document,
why are you bringing it to the IETF?" In pure terms, the latter
question is, of course, entirely valid.
In pragmatic terms, I'll suggest that it is cast in a way that is
frankly unfriendly, as well as going against quite a bit of established
-- and productive -- practice.
I'll remind folk of the Thaler research suggesting that such work has
the best track record of success for the modern IETF.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
