[ih] IETF relevance (was Memories of Flag Day?)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

John Day via Internet-history wrote in
 <1CB203A9-50F0-4A22-967E-00BE4AD9EB00 at comcast.net>:
 ...
 |On Dave Crocker's comment:
 |>> I can't imagine someone coming to the IESG today, saying "I see \
 |>> this problem and I think the IETF should form a WG and figure out \
 |>> a solution".
 |> 
 |> And yet people regularly think they can do exactly that.  In spite \
 |> of zero track record of success for that model in decades, certainly \
 |> for applications, and I suspect more generally.
 |
 |This is because the uninitiate think that these groups are top-down \
 |like most organizations, rather than bottom up as they actually are.

I do not know whether this is true for IETF from my shallow view.
I think it also heavily depends on the working group.
I think it can happen you do not even get proper responses.

But one can only admire how Geoff Clare and Andrew Josey of the
OpenGroup deal with people coming by in that way (for POSIX)!

For example, thanks to them, the well-known C socket interface,
that also entered IETF RFC(s; 2553), will continue to work (from
a standard's point of view) regardless of possible problems that
new(er) ISO C standards impose on alignment.  (Aka "undefined
behaviour".)
So whereas here everything is tried to give people a hand, the
IETF has protocols which leave you standing in the rain without
any tools at hand you can use to get out of the situation.  Take
DKIM and mailing-lists.

  ...

Steffen via X

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)