Subject: Rechartering WGLC results

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:17:19 -0400

About a month ago, I started a last call on my proposed charter.  The 
indicated end date was June 4, but I decided to give a bit more time for 
comments, especially as there were two new proposals.  There were comments 
on the list from 12 distinct people, which are summarized below.

I also received one off-list comment with a proposal for additional work. 
I encouraged that person to bring that proposal to the mailing list, but it 
never appeared.

There were two general comments on the charter as a whole; Sam Hartman and 
Matt Crawford both said it looked OK, though Sam suggested running it 
through a grammar checker, and Matt was skeptical of some of the 
milestones.  We'll work on the milestones; they're not that hard to change 
compared to adopting a new charter.

There were two proposals for new work:

- Doug Engert proposed adding some means of carring level-of-assurance
  information.  There were two comments in support of this, though neither
  indicated a willingness to author or co-author such a proposal.  There
  were no objections, but it does not appear to me that we have consensus
  to adopt this as a WG item.

  It does appear that what Doug proposes can be done as authorization data,
  such that it does not require changes to the base protocol.  Therefore,
  if he or others are interested in pursuing this work, I would suggest
  preparing an internet-draft on the subject for individual submission.
  Limited review of such a document would be an acceptable topic for this
  list, as would be the case for any proposed extension, but especially
  for one requiring assignment of a number subject to review by this WG
  under RFC4120.

- Paul Rabinovish proposed defining naming constraints for the
  KerberosPrincipalName SAN for use in X.509 certificates.  The only
  response was from Martin, who seemed confused about what was being
  proposed and in any case did not express support or opposition.  Thus,
  I don't think there is consensus within the Kerberos WG to adopt this
  proposal.

  Personally, I think this is a good idea, but I'm also not sure whether
  it belongs here.  However, since we're talking about a charter proposal,
  the question isn't really whether it's within our current scope, but
  whether it's something for which there is support for a charter item, and
  that does not appear to be the case.  Since Russ and Tim directed Paul
  to us, I'm going to assume it doesn't fall within the charter of PKIX
  either.  Therefore, I would suggest pursuing this as an individual
  submission, but asking both WG's for input when the time is right.

I would be happy to provide proponents of either of these proposals with 
advice and assistance on moving an individual submission through our 
process, and help in finding an AD to sponsor them.  Please contact me 
off-list if there's anything I can do to help.

So, that leaves us with the admin protocol work; specifically, the data 
model and LDAP schema documents.  I said in my last call message that this 
item would be included only if there was consensus to adopt it and a 
volunteer to do the work.  The latter criteria has clearly been satisfied; 
Leif has offered to author and at least 5 other people have offered to 
review.

The difficult question, then, is whether we have consensus to adopt the 
item.  As I noted previously, there was lively discussion of this during 
our meeting in Prague.  However, I asked for the people who were opposed at 
the time to speak up on the list, and no one has.  On the other hand, a 
number of people have expressed support for this work, some of whom were 
not present at the meeting.  So, I think we probably do have something 
resembling consensus.

Sam also brought up the question of whether anyone would implement this 
work.  When this was brought up in Prague, none of the implementors present 
were willing to speculate.  None of them have commented here on the list, 
either.  I would have serious reservations if I thought it unlikely that 
anyone would ever implement the results of this work; but unfortunately, I 
have no concrete basis on which to make such an assessment.  What I do have 
is my general impression that multiple implementors would be receptive to 
proposals to do so, especially if they came with offers to do some of the 
work.  That's not much, but it's enough to alleviate my worries about 
wasting time, at least for a while.

So, I will leave the LDAP work in the charter proposal, with the caveat 
that as the work progresses, I will watch both for continued interest in 
doing the work and in more concrete evidence that it will be implemented. 
If the former drops off or the latter fails to materialize, we may need to 
ask to have the item dropped from our charter.  I would ask the proponents 
of this work to do their best to make sure this does not turn out to be a 
mistake.

-- Jeff