CURRENT MEETING REPORT

Minutes of the Internet Architecture Board Open Meeting (iab)

Reported by Abel Weinrib, Intel Corporation

The meeting opened with Brian Carpenter hailing the departing IAB members: Steve Crocker, the author of RFC #1; Lixia Zhang, now Professor Zhang, who is going to teach students; Christian Huitema, no longer to be imitated by Stev Knowles; and Phil Gross, who, as IETF chair and then IAB member, has done so much for the IETF community.

Report on Chris Weider's IAB-sponsored Workshop on Character Sets in the Internet

Before the 35th IETF, the IAB sponsored a character workshop on February 29-March 1. Workshop chair Chris Weider presented some of the preliminary findings from the workshop. The workshop report will be available in draft form in six weeks, with an RFC to follow shortly.

The basic framework adopted is to use MIME tagging and registration procedures.

Recommendations from the workshop to the IAB include:

- Examine RFCs to determine how they handle character sets--obsolete/annotate where necessary;

- recommend to the RFC editor and Applications Area Director that they specify character handling;

- produce a perspective document on character set work;

- is 10646 is sufficient for use?;

- point to 10646 guidelines for character set work; and,

- the IRTF should consider forming a research group on character sets.

IAB, IETF, IRTF issues, (Brian Carpenter et al.)

The IAB is keen to fulfill its architectural role. Some working groups spend significant time on non-standards track issues (research or architecture). IRTF research groups do good work that is widely unknown in the community.

Ideas that came up during IAB discussion on these topics:

- The IAB should identify and call out cross-area architectural issues;

- focus the IETF on working groups on standards-track milestones (of course, managed by IESG);

- create new research/architectural groups to remove some of the noise from WGs;

- these research groups might be invitational, but should regularly report to the community;

- existing research groups should be asked to report in open meetings; and,

- in general, increase exposure of IRTF (Web pages, etc.) to the community.

Steve Crocker took an informal poll of the audience, which showed that many people felt that the IETF is getting less efficient in its operation.

Hearing of Perkins SMI appeal re. advancement of RFC 1902, 1903 and 1904 to draft standard

Dave Perkins presented his appeal--see attached slides.

- David Perkins <dperkins@scruznet.com> has appealed to the IAB as follows:

- "This appeal asks the IAB to review the decision of the IESG to elevate RFCs 1902, 1903, and 1904 to DRAFT level.

- "This appeal asks that these specifications have their status level changed back to PROPOSED until ALL THE REQUIREMENTS as specified in RFC 1602 (and clarified in the poised WG draft) are met."

The IAB decided to accept this appeal although a close reading of RFC 1602 shows that there is no provision for appealing IESG decisions.

After questions and discussion, the IAB huddled, and announced came to the following conclusion:

RECOMMENDATION 1

a) The IAB recommends that the replacement for RFC 1602 should clarify and broaden the possible grounds for appeal, as already covered in the relevant poised'95 WG draft.

The IAB notes that the RFCs were published despite an appeal being under way, there being no provision for delaying publication in RFC 1602. The IAB believes this was correct, in the interests of timeliness.

b) The appeal was notified to the IAB on January 10, 1996 and to the IETF list on January 23. On January 30, the IAB requested e-mail submissions by February 10, and received some 25 messages. The appeal was discussed in the IAB teleconference on February 13, in the IAB's face-to-face meeting at the LA IETF, and in the Open IAB meeting at the LA IETF where final verbal submissions were made by David Perkins, Dierdre Kostick and others.

c) One issue in the appeal is whether the interoperability requirement of the IETF standards process is limited to interoperability of different implementations "over the wire" or whether its scope is wider. The IAB has concluded that the general understanding of "interoperability" in the IETF is limited to "over the wire" but this may be too narrow in some cases, such as the present one.

RECOMMENDATION 2

a) The IAB recommends that the replacement for RFC 1602 should clarify the meaning of "interoperable implementations", as already covered in the relevant poised'95 WG draft.

b) A related issue is that RFC 1602 does not make clear who is responsible for documenting demonstrations of interoperability, and who is reponsible for making this documentation available to the community.

RECOMMENDATION 3

a) The IAB recommends that the relevant WG chair should be responsible for documenting interoperability demonstrations, and for providing this information to the IESG via the Area Director. The IETF Secretariat should be responsible for making this material available to the community. The replacement for RFC 1602 should specify these responsibilities.

b) A technical issue in the appeal is whether the SNMP usage of ASN.1 is viewed as usage of an SNMP "dialect" of ASN.1 or strict formal usage of one of the formal standard versions of ASN.1. In the former case, conformance requirements can be treated more loosely than in the latter. The IAB has concluded that the general understanding in the IETF is that SNMP uses a dialect of ASN.1-1988 and does not conform strictly to either ASN.1-1988 or ASN.1-1994. However, the dialect of ASN.1-1988 used is not properly documented.

RECOMMENDATION 4

a) The IAB recommends that the NM AD charters a short-lived WG (or a BOF, if that is sufficient) to document this ASN.1 dialect.

b). D. Perkins appears to claim that

- the interoperability requirement extends to ASN.1 compilers

- that ASN.1 discrepancies in the SMI definitions lead to non-interoperability

- that the IESG has ignored this in its decision to approve RFC 1902, 1903 and 1904 as Draft Standard

c) Other comments received by the IAB claim that:

- there is massive demonstrated interoperability between SNMP agents and managers using MIBs based on the incriminated ASN.1

- that an informal "IETF" interpretation of ASN.1 is appropriate

- that the SMI inconsistencies pointed out by D. Perkins have no practical importance

- that these issues have been extensively discussed in the SNMPv2 WG where D. Perkins was clearly in the minority.

d) The IAB notes that in its "protocol action" referring to the SMI documents, the IESG noted that some editorial changes are needed prior to full Standard status. However we also note that the messages from the WG Chair to the NM AD, that asked for the documents to be progressed, did not specifically address the interoperability issue. It seems to have been assumed that since the interoperability of SNMPv2 managers and agents was common knowledge, that was sufficient. Indeed, as noted above, RFC 1602 does not specify who should be responsible for documenting interoperability.

e) The IAB concludes that:

- regardless of which interpretation of interoperability is used, in a formal sense the interoperability requirements of RFC 1602 were not documented in this case.

- the main reason for this is that RFC 1602 does not either precisely define interoperability, nor specify who is responsible for documenting it. Our recommendations 2 and 3 above address this.

- the technical ambiguity arises from the history of ASN.1, and our recommendation 4 above addresses this.

- we see no advantage to the community in reversing the IESG decision to advance the documents to Draft Standard, but they must not be further advanced until recommendation 4 has been followed and until appropriate interoperability documentation has been provided to the IESG and the community.