--On Wednesday, 01 March, 2006 09:40 +0100 Brian E Carpenter
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think we're at risk of confusing two identifiers:
> RFC 9999 and STD 999.
>
> As I've just said on the newtrk list, I think John is on the
> right track for STD 999 type identifiers. But I took this
> requirement to refer to RFC 9999 type identifiers. As Humpty
> Dumpty would explain better than me, they're different.
I have made a leap here, which I clearly should have been more
explicit about. My apologies.
Explanation: I'm trying to look at Techspec through a "figure
out what the problem is and then how to solve it" perspective
rather that a "how to tune what we are doing now" one. We've
been repeatedly encouraged to do that. So I read the
description of this issue/ requirement, saw what "permanent
IDs", especially early ones, were for, and got "these are
identifiers of the _standards_, not identifiers of the
documents".
Now, if one wants to identify the standards, then the right
target is, IMO, offspring-of-STD and not a serial document
number (which the RFC 9999 numbers ultimately are). And it
appears to me that we need those stable standards-reference
numbers (or standardized acronyms, or whatever we use -- another
newtrk topic) regardless of what we do about the multi-step
standards model, i.e.,
* If we keep the present system, we need to get stable
standards-references assigned at Proposed (or earlier)
because few things go to Internet Standard and those
that do take a long time.
* If we drop the number of maturity levels to two or
one, we will still need a way to assign stable
standards-reference numbers because of publication lag
(even if it is short) and because we revise standards.
* And, if we develop a way to fast-track Internet
Standards on the basis of market acceptance, there is
still a significant lag time while that market
acceptance and experience develops and we therefore
still need standards-reference numbers early on.
For the purposes of any of those references, especially by other
groups, assignment of serial document numbers is (or should be)
largely irrelevant. The fact that we have been using them as
standards-identifiers and are talking about assigning them early
is, to me, more a sign that our standards-identifier system
--i.e., the STD numbers-- is broken and needs to be fixed, not
that we need to devise a new system for serial document numbers.
john
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