Subject: [spfbis] Process decisions about scope of charter

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 18:38:36 -0400

Dear colleagues,

In some recent discussion about 4408bis, there was disagreement as to
whether we may remove a feature that is in very little use.  The
arguments turned on the question of whether extremely little use
qualifies as "unused".

After careful consideration of the arguments, the history of the
chartering of the WG, and some hallway discussions here at the
Vancouver meeting, your chairs have determined that, for our purposes,
"unused" has its ordinary English meaning: not in use, at all.

We appreciate that this is not the way we as a community normally
proceed when advancing a document on the standards track.  That is
actually part of the reason we have come to this conclusion.  At the
time the WG was chartered, the aim was to move RFC 4408 to the
standards track with the barest minimum of changes.  This is why the
charter says in more than one place that we're not allowed to change
things that are in use.  We are not moving a document along the
standards track; we are converting from the experimental track to the
standards track, and we want to do that with maximal backward
compatibility.  

This means that the RFC that eventually gets published probably will
have some features in it that are broken or poor ideas; these will
need to be removed in a second pass.  We recognize that this is
inefficient, and are not completely happy with such a result, but we
believe that this is the only approach that is consistent with the
intent of the charter.  We acknowledge that the charter's text is
written in such a way that different readers of good will could come
to different conclusions about what it means.  That's why we are
issuing this process decision.

We hope that this decision can close the discussion of the meta-issue
about whether we can remove a little-used feature, and allow us to
return our focus to completing our remaining work items.

Best regards,

AS and SM 
SPFBIS co-chairs.

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]