Re: Proposed charter for the hypothetical Working Group

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr>]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 08:47:20PM +0100,
 Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy.claranet.de> wrote 
 a message of 11 lines which said:

> Flame:  Where's the proposed FSM charter ?

Attached.
 
> Something on the way to GMaNe removed what you attached,

No, the problem was between the chair and the keyboard.

State machines are found in many RFC, for many different protocols
(see, for instance 2131, 2461, 3215, 3989, 4006, 4271, etc). But IETF
has no formal language to describe these state machines, leaving
authors to use tables or list of transitions or ASCII-art. These
informal descripotions are not suitable for automatic processing.

The goal of the WG is to produce such a formal language. The language
will be a text language, usable in RFC. The language must allow state
machines to be checked (for instance for completeness) or translated
to other formats.

The language will focus on state machines and will not try to be a
complete specification language. There are no plans to write protocols
entirely in a formal language.

The final goal is to have a Standards Track RFC for this language, and
to encourage every RFC author to use it for state machines. Although
the WG is formed in the Application Area, its work is intra-area
because documents from other areas will use it directly.

The language will allow to specify at least the following elements of
a state machine:

* states,
* events,
* transitions,
* actions.

The WG has a public mailing list, cosmogol at ietf.org, archived at TODO.

Milestones:

Prague + 1 month:  First WG Internet-Draft
Prague + X months : WG Last Call 
Prague + Y months: ask IESG for consideration as a Proposed
                    Standard

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