Subject: Document Action: 'RFC 4148 and the IPPM Metrics Registry are Obsolete' to Informational RFC (draft-morton-ippm-rfc4148-obsolete-03.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:35:41 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'RFC 4148 and the IPPM Metrics Registry are Obsolete'
  (draft-morton-ippm-rfc4148-obsolete-03.txt) as an Informational RFC

This document is the product of the IP Performance Metrics Working Group.

The IESG contact person is Lars Eggert.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-morton-ippm-rfc4148-obsolete/

Technical Summary

This memo recommends that RFC 4148, the IP Performance Metrics (IPPM)
Registry be reclassified as Historic, and the IANA IPPM Metrics
Registry itself be withdrawn from use. The current registry
structure has been found to be insufficiently detailed to uniquely
identify IPPM metrics. Despite apparent efforts to find current or
even future users, no one has responded to the third quarter of 2010
call for interest in the RFC 4148 registry.

Working Group Summary

This is a strange draft in a sense that it does not contain any technical
content, it only asks IANA to stop updating a registry. Technically, it
is therefore very simple and does not need lots of reviews.

The issue itself, do we need a registry for IPPM metrics, has been under
discussion for about 6 months. During those 6 months, the WG could not
identify anybody actually using the registry or interested in upgrading
it to something more useful. Further evidence that the registry is not
used, is given in the document. It should also be noted that obsoleting
this registry will not break anything. IANA practice is to keep the
files related to an obsoleted registry at their current location, if
somebody is actively using these files, they will still be there with
their current content.

An obvious questions is why the WG cares about an unused registry. The
problem is that even though the registry is not used, it needs to be
maintained. Maintaining it requires considerable effort from both
document authors for new metrics (in particular when they are not familiar
with the concept of a registry) and the IANA. We want to avoid that.

Document Quality

Good.

Personnel

Document shepherd is Henk Uijterwaal ([email-masked]). Lars Eggert
([email-masked]) reviewed the document for the IESG.