Subject: Re: [Uri-review] draft-larmouth-oid-iri-01 editorials

From: John Larmouth <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 15:42:50 +0100

Alfred, Chris,

Many thanks for all your help.

You will see that I have now posted  draft-larmouth-oid-iri-02 which  
contains all the corrections you suggested, and there have been no 
further comments on uri-review in the last couple of weeks..

It is now my intention to e-mail [email-masked] (in accordance with  RFC  
4395) to request IANA to register 'oid:' as a permanent URI scheme, 
referencing draft-larmouth-oid-iri-02 (IANA considerations) for the 
registration template.

If anyone on this list has problems with that, please  respond in the 
next week. 

I guess that the Designated Expert for the IANA requested Expert Review 
is likely to be Alfred (who has been most active in reviewing earlier 
drafts), and will hopefully have no problems in rapidly responding to 
that request from IANA.

I hope we can soon bring this to a conclusion.

Thank you.

John L

---

From: Alfred Hönes <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:11:07 +0200 (MESZ)

> further comments on uri-review in the last couple of weeks..

The tools.ietf.org web site I'm used to track new I-Ds
might be lacking behind; it still does not show up there.
So I'll take another quick look at it later.

> drafts), and will hopefully have no problems in rapidly responding to

Too much flowers, John!   :-)
(It's simply been just that I recently restarted IETF work
which I had to batch for several months.)

The IANA directory of registries at http://www.IANA.ORG/protocols/
states:

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) Schemes

[...]

*   URI Schemes          RFC 4395  Expert Review (Graham Klyne)

I have no indication that this is information were outdated.

> I hope we can soon bring this to a conclusion.

Alfred.

---

From: Ira McDonald <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:39:07 -0400

Hi John,

The IANA Protocol Registries state that Graham Klyne is the current
Designated Expert for URI schemes.

  http://www.iana.org/protocols/

Note that RFC 4395 says:

"In the case of a permanent registration request, the Designated Expert
may:

 o  Accept the URI scheme name for permanent registration.
 o  Suggest provisional registration instead.
 o  Request IETF review and IESG approval; in the meanwhile, suggest
     provisional registration."

That last means "publish as an RFC", and has been the typical process
for permanent URI schemes for years now.

Cheers,
- Ira

Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Chair - Linux Foundation Open Printing WG
Blue Roof Music/High North Inc
email: [email-masked]
winter:
  579 Park Place  Saline, MI  48176
  734-944-0094
summer:
  PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI 49839
  906-494-2434

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 10:42 AM, John Larmouth
<[email-masked]> wrote:
>  contains all the corrections you suggested, and there have been no further
> comments on uri-review in the last couple of weeks..
>
> If anyone on this list has problems with that, please  respond in the next
> week.
> I guess that the Designated Expert for the IANA requested Expert Review is
> likely to be Alfred (who has been most active in reviewing earlier drafts),
> and will hopefully have no problems in rapidly responding to that request
> from IANA.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Uri-review mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/uri-review
>

---

From: John Larmouth <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:22:33 +0100

Thanks for this Ira - I will go for "provisional".

I guess I do not need to refer to Graham by name.

Roughly how long would it take for this to get convered to "permanent"
(assuming that the "provisional" gets approved")?

It seems to depend on it being conververted to a full RFC, which
sometimes seems to take a long time.  What would be an optimistic and a
pessimistic estimate, assuming no major objections?

(Just to help with our planning.)

Thanks.

John L

Ira McDonald wrote:

Hi John,

Note that RFC 4395 says:

Cheers,
- Ira

Alfred, Chris,

Thank you.

John L

--
Prof John Larmouth
Larmouth T&PDS Ltd
(Training and Protocol Design Services Ltd)
1 Blueberry Road
Bowdon [email-masked]
Altrincham
Cheshire
WA14 3LS
England
Tel: +44 161 928 1605

---

From: Ira McDonald <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 15:41:52 -0400

Hi John,

This is an informal answer - your mileage will certainly vary...

To publish as an RFC, an appropriate IETF Area Director
(Applications??) has to briefly review the document (1 month)
and start an IETF Last Call (1 month).

Then, the IETF AD has to take the document to the IESG
for approval as an Informational RFC (several months).

Then the RFC Editor has to publish it (four to twelve months).

That is to say, a pretty long time.

Cheers,
- Ira

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 2:22 PM, John Larmouth
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> It seems to depend on it being conververted to a full RFC, which sometimes
> seems to take a long time.  What would be an optimistic and a pessimistic
> estimate, assuming no major objections?
>

---

From: Alfred Hönes <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:48:00 +0200 (MESZ)

John,
firstly, ACK for the -02
which has appeared in the archives in the meantime!

> Thanks for this Ira - I will go for "provisional".

I do not believe that this makes much sense, since the 'oid'
URI/IRI Scheme registration is based on ITU-T Recommendations,
which should be considered a rather stable reference with much
support behind it.  -- Or did I overlook something?

> I guess I do not need to refer to Graham by name.

Indeed; unlike for URN Namespace ID registrations, RFC 4395 has
made the Designated Expert for URI Scheme review a subsidiary of
IANA (page 10, item 3 of 2nd blocj of steps in section 5.2:
    "IANA requests Expert Review ..."

So the basice step is forwarding the registration document
(or the registration template with a pointer to the draft)
to IANA (loc. cit.)

> Roughly how long would it take for this to get convered to
> "permanent" (assuming that the "provisional" gets approved")?
>
> sometimes seems to take a long time.  What would be an optimistic
> and a pessimistic estimate, assuming no major objections?
>

I guess the effort for a later 'upgrade' would be the same
as for a direct attempt to get "permanent" registration.

Independent of the target status, IMO publication as an RFC
would be very useful to have a stable document that can be
referenced, and thus should be attempted.

I expect that one of your aim is to make the 'oid' URI scheme
available for (normative) use in future IETF Standards.
In this case, as far as I can see a Standards Track RFC would be
needed anyway, to avoid the creation of normative downreferences!

Thus, it might even be attractive to immediately try Standards Track.
That would not exclude using the current draft as a registration
document for "provisional" in the interim, and pursuing its
publication as an RFC in parallel.

To go for Proposed Standard, an AD would have to initially support
the draft and ususally personally 'shepherd' it through the IESG,
including the IETF Last Call (LC) procedure.
Thus, support by the responsible AD would be essential.

You should preferably seek early advice from the responsible APP Area
Director (AD), which I assume will be Lisa Dusseault (otherwise she
certainly will quickly refer to her co-AD, Alexey Melnikov).

Note: The most recent contact information for all IESG members ist
  listed on <http://www.IETF.ORG/iesg/members.html> .

The AD may be able to also give you a more realistical estimation
of the time needed for approval as Proposed Standard, given current
workload of the AD and the entire IESG, -- of course only in the
absence theoretically possible significant objections from the IETF
at large, during LC.

Should problems arise, stepping back to a less rigid procedure,
to arrive at a lower level, will be easier than to entirely restart
with a 'higher-grade' procedure .

> ...

Kind regards,
  Alfred Hönes.

-- 

+------------------------+--------------------------------------------+
| TR-Sys Alfred Hoenes   |  Alfred Hoenes   Dipl.-Math., Dipl.-Phys.  |
| Gerlinger Strasse 12   |  Phone: (+49)7156/9635-0, Fax: -18         |
| D-71254  Ditzingen     |  E-Mail:  [email-masked]                     |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------------+

---

From: Alfred Hönes <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:06:38 +0200 (MESZ)

Ira,

I wouldn't be so pessimistic as you said below.
(For details, see below.)

As I already have pointed out, for documents of this kind
Proposed Standard might only take a small amount of time
in excess of what will be needed for Informational,
(albeight the AD might even omit IETF LC for Informational).

> Then the RFC Editor has to publish it (four to twelve months).

That's not true (currently).  To be fair to the RFC Editor staff:
Most documents without 'built-in' road blockers (in particular
Normative References to documents not yet approved, not yet
finalized, or even not yet written at all!) or awaiting completion
of IANA processing, currently can be observed to arrive in the
final Author's review stage (AUTH48 state in the RFC Editor Queue)
very quickly.
Things got much worse for the Independent Submission stream due
to Copyright issues with the IETF Trust after RFC 5378, but that
should be entirely out of scope here.

Details:

Looking at the RFC-Ed Queue at this moment, you can see that *all*
Informational drafts on the IETF stream delivered to the RFC Editor
and not blocked by missing references or IANA processing already
have arrived in the final RFC Editor review stage (RFC-EDITOR state),
or in AUTH48.
Standards Track documents are similar, but due to larger volume
and size at average, and due to much more older documents having
become unblocked recently by new arrivals and thus consuming cycles,
a single document (arrived at the RFC Editor on Sep 25) is in
editorial processing among them.
Currently, the duration of final review by the authors (and if there
were nontrivial changes, by the AD) has much more influence on the
time needed from IESG approval to RFC publication -- 33 RFCs-to-be
from the IETF stream are in AUTH48 currently.
(Note that the figures at http://www.RFC-Editor.ORG/CurrQstats.txt
include ISR documents etc.; I have discounted for these above.
This summary is a snapshot apparently taken before the most recent
queue changes on Friday.)

So, including final author review, 2 months would perhaps be more
realistical, not 4..12.

> That is to say, a pretty long time.

Pretty long anyway, but not so much as you fear.

Attempts to increase the numbers of hours per day (in order to
give the IESG et al. more working cycles) have not arrived at
IETF consensus in the past, and would have collided with the
firm opinion of other SDOs anyway.  :-)

Kind regards,
  Alfred.

---

From: David Booth <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:16:10 -0400

John,

Why wouldn't an HTTP URI prefix be just as good or better for this
purpose?  The use of HTTP URI prefixes is described here:
http://dbooth.org/2006/urn2http/
Note that HTTP URIs could dramatically improve the adoption rate for a
new protocol, by resolving to a download of the protocol implementation
software, as suggested by Graham Klyne:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2009Sep/0029.html 

David Booth

-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
Cleveland Clinic (contractor)

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.

---

From: John Larmouth <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:54:17 +0100

David,

We  have been trying to get an 'oid' IRI scheme registered for a long 
time now, and the syntax is well embedded in ITU-T standards.  I am 
operating on behalf of the ASN.1 Group in ISO/IEC and in ITU-T, and we 
do not want to change horses now.  Moreover, we do not believe that an 
HTTP prefix would meet our requiremes for use with the Object Identifier 
Resolution process and for other purposes involving ASN.1-based protocols.

John L