Subject: opt-in and decision making

From: Erik Nordmark <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 21:14:51 +0200 (CEST)

Folks on the mailing list have started to wonder what happened
with the opt-in WG last call, and rightly so.

The reason for the delay is that the chairs wanted to check with the ADs
to make sure they were not misreading things and that they are
following the documented processes etc - especially given
that opt-in has been quite contentious in the WG.
Some vacations and travel of the chairs and ADs have drawn out
these discussions. In highsight I should have let the WG know that this
was going on.

Also in hindsight, I think the debate around opt-in has been unnessarily 
polarized. I think there have been actions increasing polarization as
well as trying to decrease polarization on both sides of the issue
and I sure hope we all (in the WG and in the larger sense the IETF) can
can do a better job at avoiding polarization in the future.
After all, we all would like to see DNSSEC deployed thus at that level
the WG has a shared goal; it is when we drill down that we end up with
different views.

Looking at the range of issues around opt-in it seems to me personally
that the factors on the table are very hard to compare; it seems to be
a comparison of very different types of fruit (complexity vs. flexibility, etc)
combined with honest attempts to guess the future, that need to be taking into
account to come to a good decision. Thus I'm not surprised that people have
weighed things differently in order to come up with a single, one-bit answer.

And if you asked me for my personal opinion I would honestly suggesting
tossing a coin even though that might seem irresponsible; I don't feel
I personally have a mechanism to weigh the factors together to come up
with a good answer. Perhaps that is because I don't have much experience
in the evolution, implementation and deployment of DNS.

But the WG needs to make a decision and per our processes it is
up to the chairs to guage the consensus, or lack thereof, in the WG.

   Erik

--
to unsubscribe send a message to [email-masked] with
the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
archive: <http://ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/>