Subject: About relationship to other standards - 2142 in particular

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 09:13:43 +0200

One word to remember:

ALL IETF standards are "voluntary compliance".
People choose to implement them (or not).

When we put into our document a statement saying "you MUST implement (some 
other standard)", we are creating a dependency - saying that you must 
implement this other (voluntary) standard in order to fully implement this 
standard. At times, that's a very tough requirement; at other times, it 
means that in order to conform to our standards, multiple departments have 
to change how the deploying enterprise operates - this may be even harder 
than an implementation mandate.

We should do that sparingly, and only if it is necessary for 
interoperability.

It is quite a bit less worrisome if we put statements into the text saying 
things like "If you want to do this particular thing, you can look at RFC 
xxxx for a way to do it" - that's not making the other thing something our 
standards depend on.

In the case of "abuse@", my personal opinion is that our documents should 
document the "news@" and "usenet@" convention (because these are *ours*), 
and only say something like "For other conventions on standard addresses to 
contact for abuse, you might like to consult RFC 2142".

Don't create dependencies and requirements where you don't have to.

                        Harald