Re: IANA assignments

[Thomas Narten <narten@us.ibm.com>]

>   Is it possible for IANA to initiate a discussion in the mailing-list
>   before publishing a value, at least, for long lived drafts ?

Not really practical. Please see RFC 2434, where it talks about
mailing lists. Bottom line: IANA doesn't have the resources or
subject-matter expertise to read mailing list discussions and make
sense out of the diverse opinions that tend to get expressed.

But one can certainly write an IANA considerations section (again see
RFC 2434) that specifies that a Designated Expert should make the
evaluation, and one of the steps of that process could be to check
with relevant WGs first, and so forth.

WGs have a lot of flexibility in defining how they want their name
spaces managed. But IANA certainly can't guess what the right thing to
do is. That's why it's so important the authors/WGs pay attention to
IANA considerations and specify them carefully.

Thomas