Network Working Group J. Klensin
Internet-Draft June 6, 2004
Expires: December 5, 2004
Repurposing the STD Designation
draft-klensin-newtrk-std-repurposing-00.txt
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Abstract
Over the years, it has been repeatedly observed that the STD nnnn and
BCP nnnn designation for IETF Standards has not worked well, either
as a stable reference for external specifications or as a combined
reference for multiple documents that are linked together into a
single specification. This document proposes two changes that have
been discussed on and off for some time, but never written up or
considered as specific proposals. The first of these would assign a
STD (or BCP) number to a specification when it enters the first level
of the Standards Track (or is first designated as a BCP). The second
would turn STDs and BCPs into actual documents that describe what
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they identify and their publication and change history.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Proposal Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. A New Document Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Content and Organization of an STD Document . . . . . . . . 6
5. Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Operational Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. References to STDs or References to RFCs . . . . . . . . . . 9
8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
10. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
11. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
11.1 Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
11.2 Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . 11
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1. Introduction
The "STD" and "BCP" labels are described in [RFC2026] as subseries of
the RFC series, with their numbers being assigned when documents are
published as Internet Standards or as BCPs. Beyond those brief
statements, the organization of the two series, the classification of
documents as either belonging together as part of a single "STD"
specification or as separate, have largely been a matter of oral
tradition, with more of the decisions being made as part of the RFC
indexing process than explicitly by the IESG as part of the standards
process. The intent has been to permit a stable reference to
particular specifications and groups of documents making up a
specification, a reference that survives replacement of one RFC with
another, addition or deletion of RFCs from the collective
specification, and so on.
While the intentions are fairly clear and quite desirable, this
document suggests that the system has never worked well, especially
for STDs that comprise (or point to) several RFCs. There is no
easily-accessible audit track that specifies which documents were
part of an STD at a particular time (which can be very important for
determining what a specification that points to an STD actually means
or requires). The low level of involvement of the IESG in the
classification process is probably several problems waiting to
happen. And the "do not assign an STD number until the specification
reaches full Internet Standard" model is unrealistic in a world in
which much of the Internet runs on Proposed Standards and in which
the IETF only very rarely approves and publishes "Applicability
Statement" documents (and, when it does publish them, has little idea
what to do with them -- several documents that rationally fall into
that category have been published as BCPs instead).
This document is intended as a very specific supplement and addition
to [WhatStandards] and is believed to be consistent with its general
analysis and the issues it raises. However, its emphasis is on a
paper track and specific "benchmark" or "snapshot" documentation, not
on web pages and bug tracking. On the other hand, the ideas proposed
here could provide some of the anchoring for the "label system" that
is required by the suggestions of that document.
The discussion and proposal that follows are written in terms of
traditional standards track documents (Proposed, Draft, and Internet
Standard). Whether it should also be applied to BCPs needs further
review: the applicability is fairly obvious, but it is not clear
whether it is necessary enough to justify the extra trouble.
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2. Proposal Overview
This document proposes that "STD"s be turned into real documents,
separate from the underlying RFCs and managed under the direction of
the IESG as part of the standards-specification process, rather than
being simply pointers in indexes (or the RFCs under different file
names or packaging). It proposes that STD documents be created and
numbers assigned when specifications enter the formal standards track
(Proposed Standard under the model described in RFC 2026) and that
the documents be used to track maturation, applicability
recommendations, and history of those specifications. It also
outlines the format of those documents, which is expected to be
different from the format of protocol specification documents and the
RFC series generally ([RFC2223], [rfc2223bis]) and briefly discusses
a transition strategy.
While it is debatable whether everything published as a Proposed
Standard today deserves, on the basis of quality of consensus or
implementations, that definition, these documents and the early
adoption of STD numbers may, on the one hand, help focus and
discussion on that point and will, on the other, permit the IESG to
attach appropriate qualifying notes as needed. For example, if the
community concluded that a specification should be published as a
Proposed Standard, but that potential implementers should be warned
that IETF confidence in its stability was lower than usual, these
documents would be an appropriate place to publish that type of
evaluation. Conversely, if interoperable implementations already
existed before the Proposed Standard was published, the corresponding
STD document would be an appropriate place to note that fact.
These documents, and documents authoritatively (normatively)
referenced from them, will become, essentially, the definitions of
standards. Consequently, any changes to them will occur only under
IESG authority and responsibility. The IESG may, at its discretion,
and with appropriate announcements to, and consultation of, the
community, delegate authority for some sections to groups responsible
for the ongoing maintenance of the standards, but may not relinquish
responsibility for the documents themselves. However, nothing in
this specification prohibits (or requires) IESG authorization of
placement of links in the STD documents that point to less formal and
less authoritative discussions of, or comments on, the relevant
standards should they deem that appropriate.
[[ Note in Draft: In plain English, if it makes sense to the
community to have an archive of comments, discussion, or proposed
errata on the documents, that is fine, and it would be useful for
these documents to identify the locations of those archives. But we
should be very careful that the contents of such archives are not
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confused with the content of the specifications unless they go
through some sort of formal review and consensus process. The
description of that process above is deliberately open-ended and
flexible, as long as the IESG is willing to accept and maintain
formal responsibility for whatever appears on those pages and could
admit of some changes being made by, e.g., maintenance committees
should the community want to move in that direction. ]]
By extension from the above, the IESG will need to make
determinations, ideally after creating guidelines and getting
community review and assent to them, as to criteria (e.g., length,
importance, degree of discussion needed) by which authoritative
comments and qualifications about standards will be incorporated into
the STDs documents or issued as separate RFCs.
[[ Note in Draft: The author presumes that common sense will prevail
and that this document does not need to try to specify those
boundaries. If that assumption is not correct, we have other
problems that this type of specification cannot solve. ]]
If this proposal is accepted in principle, some additional sections
will be required to explicitly update RFC 2026.
3. A New Document Series
When the IESG agrees to move a document onto the standards track, it
either causes a new standard number ("STD number") to be assigned to
it, or classifies it as part of an existing standard and assigns that
number. If multiple, related, specifications are approved at the
same time, they may be assigned the same STD number. As those
documents are published as RFCs, the RFC may (and presumably usually
will) contain the standard number since it will constitute a stable
forward reference. This assignment of an STD number, and assignment
of a specification to it, results in a corresponding STD document
being created or updated, as described below. Following good sense
and existing precedent, the IESG may decide to include documents that
are not themselves on the standards track (e.g., Informational
documents explaining, or describing alternatives to, an agreed-upon
standard) in references from a STD document once that document is
defined by the assignment of a number.
Advancement of a document on the standards track, publication of
applicability statements, notes on errata or other issues of
sufficient and substantive importance to require alerting
implementers or the community will also result in modifications to
the relevant STD document. It is explicitly anticipated that
documents may be moved from one maturity level to another (i.e.,
under the current system, to Draft, Full, or Historic, or from
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Experimental to Proposed) by changing the STD document to identify
the new level and include any relevant notes as an alternative to
modifying the relevant RFC text and issuing new RFCs (and, of course,
modifying the STD document to reflect those changes).
Particular RFCs may move in and out of a STD (except for the
historical record) as one RFC replaces another. Because the STD
document is expected to contain prose, it will be possible to deal
with the long-standing issues of what "updates" means by identifying
the relevant sections or concepts. And, again because there is
descriptive prose present, the IESG will be able to deal
appropriately with the relationship between an old Full Standard and
a newer document, at a lower maturity level, that is intended to
replace it by specifying whatever they consider appropriate about
what the implementer or other reader should look at.
[[ Note in draft: Were either or both of the "Commission" (or
"attic-cleaning") drafts ([NewtrkHistoric], [NewtrkAntique]) to be
approved, the opportunities for using this STD model are obvious.
The relevant STD document could be used to quickly capture, not only
the fact that a document had been changed in status, but the date on
which that occurred and any useful information about the reason why
it was done -- using a much lighter-weight process than RFC
publication. However, this proposal is not tied to those in any way.
]]
While RFCs are permanent, STD documents are expected to evolve and
incorporate changes over time. However, they are also expected to
include explicit change histories in order to make it possible for a
reader to examine a current STD document and determine the status of
the relevant standard at any particular previous time. And STD
number, once bound to a particular conceptual standard, is never
reused for a different concept.
4. Content and Organization of an STD Document
[[Note in draft: this section still needs a good deal of work, but it
is probably better to see if agreement can be reached on the
principles here before too much time is spent on details.]]
An STD document is expected to follow the general layout and
formatting conventions of an RFC (because the community is familiar
with them). The components listed below may appear, or are expected
to appear (required materials, even if only pro-forma, are identified
with asterisks). As with RFCs, additional sections may be included
as needed and appropriate. Note that STDs don't have authors: the
RFCs have authors, but the "author" of an STD would always be "IETF"
(or the historical "Network Working Group") so there is no
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information in providing a name. A individual who had made a major
contribution to the STD document itself might be listed in an
Acknowledgement or as a Contributor.
Title.* It would be good for standards to have titles. As others
have pointed out, it would make them, especially those that
involve multiple RFCs, a lot easier to talk about.
Date.* This is the data the STD was last updated. Everything else
belongs in history or annotation.
Abstract.* As with the title, it would be good to have these for
standards, describing what the whole package does and not just
what individual RFCs do.
Maturity Level.* This is the maturity level for the STD as a whole.
Presumably it is the lowest maturity level of any of the
associated RFCs but, especially when one of the RFCs is intended
to replace an earlier, more mature one, and text is supplied below
that describes the situation, the IESG might decide to have it
reflect the maturity level associate with the least mature
document needed to form a full description of the standard.
Additional comments may be associated with this section; it need
not be just a label. If an STD is retired in its entirety, no
matter what maximum maturity level it reached earlier, this entry
may be "Historic" with optional descriptive text.
RFC list.* For each RFC that is currently associated with this STD,
the name, title, document date, and maturity level most recently
assigned and its date. Optionally, an abbreviated abstract,
applicability comments, errata, and other notes and commentary can
be associated with some or all of the RFCs. When there is a
non-obvious relationship among the various documents, it should be
described either here or in the applicability remarks below, as
appropriate (or in a separate section, if one is required).
Applicability Remarks about the standard.
Security Remarks about the standard.
History*. This section should define the entire record of changes to
the definition of the documents and applicability statements that
make up the standard, with dates identified. It should, in
particular, identify the point at which one document superceded or
updated another.
5. Transition
Obviously, there are many STD numbers assigned today that are not
associated with documents as described here. If this process is not
bootstrapped with those numbers, it probably won't work. So the
following approach, which can be applied more less mechanically, is
suggested:
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o For each existing STD number, create a prototype STD document.
This step and the following one can be done from the existing
std-index being maintained by the RFC Editor.
o Populate that document with the list of RFCs now associated with
the STD and identify all of them as Internet Standards.
o Populate the title and abstract with the title and abstract of the
first RFC in the series. This won't be perfect, and in some
cases, won't be even close, but it is better than nothing (and
_much_ better than getting stuck waiting for someone to interpret
the RFCs and do a write-up.
o Omit any applicability, errata, or similar sections.
o Populate the History section with a note to the effect that the
Standard existed before the relevant date and the document is
initialized as of that date.
6. Operational Issues
There is a case to be made that creating this sort of document series
is additional work for the IESG. In practice, this author doesn't
believe it, at least to any significant degree. All of the relevant
information is created today. It is scattered in meeting minutes and
secretariat notes, protocol action notices, discussions about whether
to restart WGs to deal with problems, etc. Today that information,
much of it quite useful, gets lost or at least becomes quite
difficult to find. Conversely, these series should reduce workload
by considerably reducing the pressure to find editors to write or
rewrite RFCs whose purpose is ultimately "this document is just like
RFC xxxx, except that section 3.1.3 is removed to permit promoting
the specification to the next maturity level. The IESG can certainly
still insist on that procedure if it deems it necessary, but it
should also be possible to Last Call a revised STD document that
contains more or less that sentence and not touch the RFC at all.
And, if a WG responsible for creating or updating an STD document
can't come up with an appropriate title and abstract/brief
description, we are in a kind of trouble that goes well beyond any
procedural issues.
This document carefully does not specify the registry mechanism for
assigning new STD numbers, nor the publication and repository
mechanism for the documents. Either or both might sensibly be done
by the RFC Editor (that arrangement would certainly be consistent
with historical precedents), but, if only because the STD series in
this form would be a new task for them, it seems wise to leave this
question to the IETF administrative process to sort out as seems
appropriate in the broad administrative context.
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7. References to STDs or References to RFCs
Before this proposal was generated, vendors who wished to specify
what they support, and potential customers who wished to specify what
they wanted to purchase, had a choice between referencing specific
RFCs (to get precision) or, for full standards, a specific STD number
(to get "the most current version"). Except for providing an "STD"
mechanism for referencing documents other than full Internet
Standards, this proposal does not change either of those options:
both are still free to use the existing forms. In the rare case in
which a vendor is deliberately attempting to confuse its potential
customers, this mechanism is not likely to help very much either. It
does, however, provide a third option, which is to specify the state
of an STD as of a particular date (even a date in the past or future)
or within a particular date range. So, whatever the referencing
issues are today, this certainly does not make them worse and almost
certainly makes them better.
8. IANA Considerations
This document does not anticipate any specific tasks for the IANA.
However, over time, it may be desirable to review and update the
descriptions of various registries to refer to STD numbers, rather
than RFC numbers, as the definitions or authority for those
registries. See also Section 6.
9. Security Considerations
This document specifies an administrative procedure for the IETF and
hence does not raise any new issues about the security of the
Internet. However, the availability of the type of document
described here may provide a convenient mechanism and repository of
vulnerabilities and other issues that are discovered after RFCs are
issued but that do not justify updating (or for which resources are
not available to update) the relevant RFC. Having an obvious place
to look for those notifications and discussions for standards-track
documents might enhance overall security somewhat.
10. Acknowledgements
The general ideas described here have been discussed on and off for
several years, but have never been turned into a public documents.
Thanks are due to several generations of IAB and IESG members and to
RFC Editor staff for helping to clarify the ideas and to identify
some variants that would or would not work. The ideas in this
specific presentation are, of course, those of the author and are one
with which some of the contributors might disagree. Pekka Savola
provided extensive and very useful comments on a preliminary version
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of the initial draft.
11. References
11.1 Normative References
[RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision
3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, October 1996.
[WhatStandards]
Loughney, J., "Standards, What Standards?",
draft-loughney-what-standards-01 (work in progress),
February 2004.
11.2 Informative References
[NewtrkAntique]
Klensin, J., "Valuable Antique Documents: A Model for
Advancement", draft-klensin-newtrk-antiques-00 (work in
progress), May 2004.
[NewtrkHistoric]
Alvestrand, H. and E. Lear, "Moving documents to Historic:
A procedure", draft-alvestrand-newtrk-historical-00 (work
in progress), March 2004.
[RFC2223] Postel, J. and J. Reynolds, "Instructions to RFC Authors",
RFC 2223, October 1997.
[rfc2223bis]
Reynolds, J. and R. Braden, "Instructions to Request for
Comments (RFC) Authors", draft-rfc-editor-rfc2223bis-07
(work in progress), August 2003.
Author's Address
John C Klensin
1770 Massachusetts Ave, #322
Cambridge, MA 02140
USA
Phone: +1 617 491 5735
EMail: john-ietf@jck.com
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