Shane, On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 09:30:10PM +0200, Shane Kerr wrote:
On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 17:41 +0200, Marco Hogewoning wrote:
Let's keep things simple please!
Indeed, but I guess you would not recommend to "simply" change a formally adopted policy document, would you? This could be seen as a nasty precedent...
You have a point there and it we might call it an oversight in the PDP to not be able to handle small changes in formatting or typos without going through the whole process again. So for the sake of it all, let's adopt this change using the current proces and focus the discussion on how to handle such changes in the future. I don't expect it to happen much, but the way you put it a small cosmetic error can result in going over a lenghty discussion again and might be a tool to bend things differently by the need to reach consensus again.
I agree.
Right now there *is* no other way to change policies, right? I found Thomas' comment a bit strange - like asking the IETF to create a standard without an Internet draft.
But he does have a point that the PDP may be heavyweight in cases like this. So you are right, lets tweak the PDP. :)
I don't think Thomas comments were strange at all. It is complete overkill to use the policy process to deal with *conventions* on how to write down a particular resource. However, it was explained quite well why we encountered this problem and it seems reasonable to use a policy proposal to get around it. However, the new proposal again creates a dependancy on a particular format instead of leaving the format out of the policy. If the proposal would read like (new text): 1.9 4-byte AS Numbers . . . Terminology "2-byte only AS Numbers" refers to AS Numbers in the range 0 - 65535 "4-byte only AS Numbers" refers to AS Numbers in the range 65536 - 4294967295 "4-byte AS Numbers" refers to AS Numbers in the range 0 - 4294967295 we would not refer to any particular format and we can just proceed whether the IETF is ready to approve ASPLAIN format or not. Also, I noticed that it is kind of strange that the policy document has no reference whatsoever to the IETF document that actually defines 4-octet AS numbers. Note that IETF uses 'octet' in their terminology, while the policy document uses the word 'byte'. Personally, I don't particularly care but it might be more consistant to use the same terminology. David Kessens ---