--On Wednesday, 12 May, 2010 17:12 +0100 Alexey Melnikov
<alexey.melni...@isode.com> wrote:
>...
> Barry/John,
> You already know that I am waiting for the FTP BOF proposal
> for Maastricht.
> I can delay asking IESG to review this document till after the
> BOF, but if there is no BOF or nothing comes out of it, I
> don't think it is fair to delay the document just because
> something can be done better in a WG.
>
> Alexey, as the sponsoring Apps AD.
Alexey,
While I'd like to see a BOF too, and I suppose that Barry and I
could get a proposal together, I think you and the IESG should
look at this in a different way.
As Paul Hoffman pointed out, there is a large community of FTP
users out there. There are even multiple people, in multiple
organizations, who spend significant time working on code for
it. However, while several of them have been willing to write
individual submission drafts, they have not been willing to show
up at the IETF and do work, with each other, to get this
standardized.
For the record, while I agree with Paul, I'd also suggest that,
even if the relevant community were much smaller, it would be
worthwhile to develop a coordinated effort to design and
evaluate FTP modification proposals if only to ensure continued
interoperability. Others may disagree, but our success record
when we tell people not to do something that works well for them
and, in their opinion, poses no risks, is terrible. All saying
"FTP is dead, go use something else" can accomplish is to drive
the work away from the IETF. That increases the risk of
interoperability problems if those who are interested don't find
another forum. If they do find another forum, it could
strengthen some body who would like to eat our lunch in other
areas, areas that we have not chosen to discard.
However, my view is that there is not, and should not be,
meaningful community consensus for putting any (or all) of these
proposals on the Standards Track unless a coordinated effort is
possible. If someone from the relevant community needs help
putting a BOF proposal together, I'd be happy to help. But,
absent signs of willingness, within that community, to
participate actively and take leadership roles, I don't see a
BOF as being helpful. It might just confirm that there is a
problem (which we know) and that no one is actually willing to
work together rather than writing individual proposals.
So my answer would be that considering these documents in an
uncoordinated way as individual submissions is a bad idea. The
alternative to a WG (or some coordination alternative) should
not be "well then, we have to process and approve the individual
submissions". It should be "if the FTP community can't organize
itself sufficiently, even with offers of help, to put a WG (or
other coordination process) together, then IETF review and
value-added is almost meaningless". If that were to be the
case, those involved should revise their documents into, e.g.,
"Paul's and Robert's clever idea for an FTP extension for
virtual hosts", publish them as Informational, enter the
relevant bits into the registry, and move on.
I'd also suggest that those who don't like FTP and think we
should do no more work on it should not be complaining about
this draft, or others, but should be writing an I-D explaining
their case. If they can get enough consensus to get that
explanation published as a BCP or standards-track document
moving FTP to Historic, so be it (although I'd be surprised).
If not and their arguments are well-reasoned and documented, I
assume that the ISE would be as welcoming to their contribution
as he would be to well-written protocol descriptions of existing
practices or strongly-motivated proposals.
I think keeping these documents off standards track because
there isn't a critical mass of designers and developers willing
to do work would be a sad outcome. However, unless the
community of folks proposing these extensions are willing to
come forward and start working with each other in a coordinated
and consensus-establishing way, I think it is by far the better
outcome than more uncoordinated and mutually underdesigned
standards-track extensions.
best,
john
p.s. I've been trying to avoid saying "a protocol-developing WG
is the only way" although it is certainly my first preference.
Maybe an FTP-specific review team that would contain at least
some appointed experts and that worked entirely by
correspondence would be adequate. Maybe we could do something
intense in a meeting or two to lay out design principles against
which the individual submissions could then be evaluated.
Maybe you or others can come up with some other idea, even if it
were radical enough to require a 3933 experiment proposal first.
But I think that anything that goes on the standard track has to
reflect IETF value-added and some reasonable level of informed
IETF consensus that the idea is a good one, both individually
and in context. And, right now, this document doesn't meet
those criteria.
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