Dear wg,
We now have a number of documents and solutions on the table in the 4rd
category: all the MAP effort, including 4rd-T & 4rd-E,
and, somehow separately, the 4rd-U effort. I will claim that there is a very
large overlap between all those solution and somehow small differences.
For the sake of this discussion, I'll say the overlap is about 90%, the exact
number is irrelevant, what matters is that this number is much more than 50%
I have expressed many times that, in my view, the main role of a standard
process is to pick one solution when multiple are available. Not that
the others are bad, but that the fact of not choosing and pushing through the
process a number of solutions that are 90% or more identical is not doing
the community any good.
Back at Beijin interim meeting, we agreed on 'publishing' a number of
documents, but did not agree on status and/or recommendation
attached to 4rd-E and 4rd-T. later, 4rd-U came as an attempt at unifying then.
At stake here is not so much the organization of the document set, nor which
document(s) are accepted as wg item(s) right now
on the basis that they are somehow technologically 'ready'.
At stake now is how many solutions that are 90% overlapping we are going to
send to the IESG. In other words,
at stake is the capability of this wg to make clear recommendations as to what
to implement and what to deploy.
At this point in time, I think the wg as the choice between a number of paths
forward:
1) Declare failure to reach consensus and stop working on this 4rd space.
2) Declare a Pyrrhic(*) victory, publish everything on the standard track
without any recommendation as to which one to use
3) Declare partial victory, publish everything as Experimental, let the market
decide and come back in two years
to put the winner on the standard track.
4) Converge to a consensus toward one 'recommended' solution, publish that one
as Standard track and publish the
other ones as experimental/informational, THEN declare victory. Note that
using standard track vs experimental is just one way
to make recommendations on status, there are others, such as publishing a
recommendation document or adding
recommendation text in a boiler plate inside each document.
I'd think that we would all agree that 1) is the least preferred option.
2) might be appealing as a short term solution to (not solve) the
recommendation problem we are faced with, but if we do that,
I would claim that the wg would have not done its job and would have simply
added to the confusion around
which transition mechanism to choose. Hence my qualification of this solution
as 'Pyrrhic' victory.
As wg co-chair, my perspective is that we should do either 3) or 4)
I would like to encourage the wg to start a discussion toward 4) on the mailing
list so that we could have a productive conversation in Paris,
where I intend to ask for wg feedback on this question.
More over, 4rd-U claims to solves a number of issues that the MAP suite of
documents does not address. It would be beneficial to have
a discussion on the mailing list to see if a) those issues are important or
not and b), if they are, are they properties of 4rd-U or could they be solved
as well
in MAP, they just have not been addressed there yet.
In the mean time, I believe we should hold off accepting any document as wg
item. I'd like to use the upcoming Paris meeting
next month as a forcing function to make progress and I encourage discussion on
the mailing list on thee above topics until then.
Alain, Softwire wg co-chair.
(*)See http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory
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