Internet Drafts and TCP RDMA

[Black_David@emc.com]

> This is not baked enough to be an Internet-Draft

Internet-Drafts do not need to be fully-baked or even
half-baked.  They're working documents and some of their
value is that they're easy to refer to and find.  I've
written or contributed to some Internet-Drafts that
were significantly lacking in the baking department
(including at least one idea that was fundamentally
wrong in 20/20 hindsight); an Internet-Draft is a good
mechanism to get ideas out to see if they require more
baking or are digging in the proverbial "wrong place".
Working Group drafts (names of the form draft-ietf-<wg>-...)
are expected to reflect some level of WG consensus, and
hence be somewhat baked, but there's no corresponding
expectation for individual submissions, and especially
not for -00 versions of individual submissions.

As an example of the utility of Internet-Drafts, the
TCP RDMA non-draft has some similarities to:

draft-csapuntz-tcprdma-00.txt

Now, isn't that easier to find than a months-old
email message in the archives?  In addition, there's
a Cisco intellectual property statement covering that
draft on the IETF intellectual property rights page:

http://www.ietf.org/ipr.html

Please take the time to write up substantial technical
proposals as Internet-Drafts.  I hope Jim isn't offended
or annoyed by this, as he's not the only person ... there
are a bunch of other things in the archives that should
have been Internet-Drafts.  This gets more important as
the community on this list expands because the list
archives are already to the point where I would not expect
newcomers to review them in their entirety.  Doug Otis
and Costa Sapuntzakis get credit for following this
exhortation in the past ...

Thanks,
--David

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David L. Black, Senior Technologist
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