Subject: [Fax] Amendment 1 to ITU T.37 Not Approved

From: James Rafferty <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 May 1999 13:17:57 -0300

Folks,   

This is a followup to my report on the ITU-T Study Group 8 meeting that was
held in March and April.   

At that time, the final status of the proposed Amendment 1 to ITU-T T.37
was on hold, pending a 4 week review period by two countries, the United
States and Germany.    The proposed amendment adds text to T.37 which
defines the "Full Mode" for store and forward Internet fax, via reference
to the new IETF Internet fax RFCs (RFC 2530-2532) and some older RFCs (for
DSN, MDN and ESMTP).   

An ITU "decision" on a document requires unanimous consent for approval.
As it turns out, after a review conducted during this 4 week period,
Germany has voted No.    The US vote is a conditional Yes (requesting that
text be added to T.37 clarifying that embedded references in IETF RFCs
listed as "Work In Progress" are not normative).   So, the net result of
this review process is that the amendment 1 to T.37 does not pass at this
time.  

Per my understanding, the next SG8 meeting at which the amendment could be
approved (with minor corrections as applicable), is to be held early next
year.    

In the remainder of this note, I will offer my perspective on what happened
and why, and also discuss where the IETF Fax WG and the ITU Q4 can go from
here to complete this approval process.   

I personally believe that this result is unfortunate for the marketplace,
since a joint IETF and ITU endorsement of new standard approaches carries
more weight in the fax community than approval by just one of these
organizations.    Nonetheless, the extended mode RFCs and their supporting
documents from the Conneg WG have been approved as standards track
documents in the IETF, so the implementor community can proceed with
implementations based on the IETF RFCs 2530-2532.       

In this case, the explanations for the NO vote from Germany and the
provisional vote from the US are focusing upon issues with references to
IETF documents in a few places.   

I'll provide a review of the issues, mainly so that they can be identified
now and hopefully not serve as obstacles to future cooperative work between
the IETF and the ITU.   

1.   References to IETF RFCs in T.37 - In its review of the draft
amendment, Germany found that the wrong version of the ESMTP RFC was being
referenced.    The current version in force within the IETF is RFC 1869,
which is at the Standard level.   The version referenced in the draft
amenment was RFC 1651, which was at the proposed standard level.    In my
view, this is a case of an editorial error, not technical, since no
technical changes of substance occurred as this document progressed to the
standard level.   But, the error was there and not spotted during the ITU
meeting, leaving the matter subject to interpretation.   

2.   Reference to "Work in Progress" documents - As I noted previously, the
reference to "work in progress" documents in some of the referenced RFCs
was an issue.   ITU recommendations only have normative references, so
there is a difference in policy on references between the two groups.   The
ITU procedural bodyTSAG clarified after the meeting that such "work in
process" document needed to be considered informative (this is how they are
treated in the IETF).   However, both the US and Germany cited this issue
in their votes.  

Going forward, the TSAG ruling should deal with this situation adequately
from an ITU standpoint.   However, the IETF should probably also review its
policy on normative vs. informative references, to make it easier for
everyone to understand what is normative within IETF standards track
documents.     

3.   Questions on Stability of IETF Extended Fax RFCs  -   The IESG
approved our 3 new RFCs in early Feb, along with the 3 referenced Conneg
RFCs.    By our rules in the IETF, these documents were then considered to
be technically stable.   There were some delays in publication, so the
documents were actually released by the RFC editor in early March.   This
was literally 1 night before the ITU contribution deadline.    As ISOC
representative, I submitted the 3 Internet fax RFCs (2530-2532) that are
directly referenced in the amendment 1 just before the deadline to the ITU
as contributions.    

The ITU rules for documents directly referenced from a recommendation is
that the documents need to be made available either in hard copy form or
via reference to a URL.    This was done for the 3 new RFCs.   

However, there were also the 3 new Conneg RFCs, which are included via
embedded reference within the Internet fax RFCs.   The requirements for
review of embedded references within the ITU are ambiguous.    The formal
requirement (per the ITU  A.005 recommendation) is to list the embedded
references.   Further review is optional.    

I had submitted the earlier versions of these documents on an FYI basis in
the prior November meeting of SG8, but given the tight contribution
deadline, I submitted only the specifically required documents for the
March meeting.    

In the technical review of the draft amendment during the Question 4
meeting, noone asked for further information about the Conneg documents.
 Had the issues been raised during the Q4 and SG8 meeting, copies of the
relevant documents or URLs could have been made available, but no such
request was made.   

Germany's position at the SG8 concluding plenary meeting was that they did
not understand all of the embedded references in the RFCs referenced by the
T.37 amendment.    Therefore, they invoked the 4 week rule to get more time
to do their review.    

In their review, after the meeting, they raised the question about why the
Conneg RFCs had not been submitted to the meeting as contributions or as
URLs.   They made an attempt to download the new RFCs, but used an obsolete
URL reference (the URL in the A.005 recommendation WAS obsolete, but the
study group was notified of this within 2 liaisons from TSAG that provided
the correct URL.   ).   

Consequently, they did not get a chance to review the new Conneg RFCs until
I submitted a copy to them late in the review period when they raised this
issue to me for the first time.   By this time, they had already decided to
vote No.    

Other ITU participants and I were in correspondence with Germany during
their review, but were not able to persuade their delegation to let the
work be approved as is.   

In summary, the formal rules on embedded RFC references are ambiguous and
subject to interpretation.    Therefore, they can be used as grounds to
hold up the technical work if ITU delegates are either unfamiliar or
uncomfortable with these documents.       

The safe course for future contributors of IETF documents will be to err in
the direction of providing too many documents or URL references, rather
than having it be perceived that we are holding back documents of
substance.   Per the TSAG rules, an exact URL reference will suffice.
However, my practical advice is to actually submit as contributions the key
documents that are direct references and then submit a list of URLs for any
key embedded references.   

In conclusion:   

The cooperation between ISOC/IETF and the ITU got off to a good start when
T.37 was approved and the two bodies reached agreement to have a common
technical definition for the simple mode, by having the T.37 recommendation
reference IETF RFCs to detail the procedures.    

The two groups also did good work together to create Amendment 1 to T.37,
defining the full mode and the technical experts in both groups supported
this.   
However, the pace of this work was fast and some ITU people were obviously
not comfortable with the process.    This did not really emerge in the
technical review of the documents at the ITU meeting, but did show up when
the procedural issue of references was addressed later in the meeting.   

Unfortunately, these procedural issues have resulted in the No vote, so the
ITU approval of the amendment 1 will be delayed.   This is a "bump in the
road", but should be correctible in the future.   

There is an interim meeting of Question 4 which will be held in September.
 I will plan to work with the T.37 editor, Toru Maeda, to address any
corrections that may be needed for the amendment and will also plan to
submit the relevant Conneg RFCs as ISOC contributions in advance of that
meeting.  We will also take into account any input from the Question 4
rapporteur, Herman Silbiger, on the appropriate next steps.      

There are also 2 communications from the ITU which we will review and
respond to within the IInternet Fax work group over the next several weeks.
  The requests may have some influence on our list of remaining milestones.   

Please feel free to follow up on any questions you may have.   

Regards, 

James Rafferty
Chair, IETF Internet Fax WG

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