Re: document classifications

[Alex Zinin <zinin@psg.com>]

Steve,

Sunday, May 11, 2003, 7:07:37 PM, Steve Bellovin wrote:
> At the Retreat, I was charged with making suggestions about new 
> document classifications.  When poking at Barbara's new IESG page 
> layout, I stumbled on info-experimental.txt, which I should have 
> remembered.  For Informational vs. Experimental, I'm mostly happy with 
> it, though I think there's an important case missing:  a deployed I?TF 
> protocol that isn't a standard, and isn't going to become one, but 
> exists.  (MSDP is the current case on the table.)  My take is that it's 
> Informational -- it's like a vendor protocol, for some value of 
> "vendor".  In general, I'd rather have Experimental more focused on 
> 4.2.1 of that document (which I do think should be published as an RFC, 
> since it clarifies 2026), and on the second two examples in Section 3.

Given that the document says:

> 4.2.1  Experimental
> 
>    The "Experimental" designation typically denotes a specification that
>    is part of some research or development effort.  Such a specification
>    is published for the general information of the Internet technical
>    community and as an archival record of the work, subject only to...
...
>    An
>    Experimental specification may be the output of ... an IETF Working
>    Group...

and:

> 4.2.2  Informational
> 
>    An "Informational" specification is published for the general
>    information of the Internet community, and does not represent an
>    Internet community consensus or recommendation. 

it seems that cases like MSDP fall more into the EXP bin...

Alex