Re: forging a new pppext charter

> From: James Carlson <[email protected]>
> To: Thomas Narten <[email protected]>
> Cc: pppext <[email protected]>


> > > 	- Names of volunteers to serve as document editors for those
> > >           updates.
> > 
> > But the goal is meaningless if there are no volunteers to do the
> > work...
>
> Yes; I think we need to identify those first, before publishing a
> charter with those goals, or just give that up for now as a goal and
> wait until people either step forward or forget about the problem.

It would be best to decide first which if any PPP RFCs need updates,
and only then consider volunteers.  Not to put too fine a point on it,
people who would volunteer to update an unspecified RFC are likely to
be go-ers who should not be allowed to work on any RFC.

A moment's thought reminds me of significant defects in all of the
main PPP RFCs.  However, opening the gates to change would be dangerous.
Perhaps PPP is now see as old, stable, and boring enough to not attract
wonderful ideas .  If not, as much energy would be spent preventing
persistent bad ideas such as fast re-connect without authentication
as fixing the fixable bugs.

Fixing some major old bugs such as authentication after LCP should
not be considered.  It's too late to make such major changes.


> ...
> Recommendations for future working group efforts:

That's a good start for a list.  
I'm not sure I agree with some of the items, but I think it would be
good to get a big list before trimming it.

Among items not listed is compression.  The ancient IESG "compromise"
for dealing with the patent problems by making all compression
"Informational" is no longer necessary for the patents that have expired
and inconsistent with the current IETF rules on patents.  Besides,
there are far more compression algorthms sort-of standarized than used
in real life.


Vernon Schryver    [email protected]

P.S.  I generally don't like the standard hossannas because they are
  usually pro forma.   However, Karl Fox's years of service to the
  IETF and this working group were exceptional.  His technically
  accurate and polite but firm chairmanship was quite valuable.