Re: What's the value of specification consistency?

["JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey at jefsey.com>]

At 20:53 04/05/2005, Ted Hardie wrote:
>  As an example: if a document out of one
> working group  was asked to create a registry for something, should a
> document from a different working group using the same underlying
> technology also create a registry?

This question is currently important to me too.
Please IETF/IANA experienced people comment?

> It's my personal believe that the IETF standards form a body of
> work, rather than just being individual specifications, and that some
> level of effort should be put in to make sure that the individual
> documents fit into the body.  We've done some of that through
> mechanisms like the RFC 2119 language and the IANA considerations
> guide, so I think there is some community consensus that this
> is useful.

Yes.

> Working out where the consistency bar should be set is sometimes easy,
> as documents fit comfortably within our community's shared sense of
> the range.  When it is hard, though, the effort and time it takes to get
> things agreed is enormous, and the ill-mannered can play a war of attrition
> to get their way.

What is difficult is to understand who is the ill-mannered in such cases. 
Who s protecting the future consistency, who is endagering it? Experience 
shows that people wanting to get their way make believe they follow the 
rules: they want to trap the IESG.

> To get this back to the form of a question: what is the right value of
> consistent for the statement:  "The IETF should produce a consistent
> set of specifications?"  Same language, format, and no more?   Anything
> already documented in an RFC like 2219? Same set of core assumptions/built
> from the same tools?  Something less?  Something more?  Something along
> a different axis entirely?

RFC 1958 provides good guideline to this. The rule is scalability. In the 
line of the IETFiquette I suggested, I suggest that when a WG says "what 
people will do with my deliverable is their problem, not ours" the 
deliverable will probably not be consistent with the rest of the specs and 
should be disregarded.

But there may be exceptions.
jfc





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