[Nut-upsuser] NUT RFC; progress report

[Roger Price]

We have to decide whether the NUT RFC should be

  1. an individual submission with status "Informational" or
  2. an IETF Working Group (WG) submission as Best Current Practice (BCP).

Should we decide 1, then your Editor will prepare a fuller text which
anticipates the questions to come from the IETF.  After that it will
be matter of negotiation between Jim, myself, the IETF Editor, IANA
and finally the IETF.  We will have little difficulty in getting an
RFC, but getting a second IANA port for TLS support is uncertain.

Should we decide 2, then we would need to request permission from an
IETF Area Director to form a WG in that Area, with an approved
charter.  A WG operates in a mailing list which is archived by the
IETF.  This means that we cannot use our nut-user list - we would have
to open a new list.  Do we have enough people willing to join a new
list to discuss IETF processes?  The submission of a text becomes more
complex.  The WG takes decisions on the basis of consensus as
determined by the WG chairman (Jim).  The advantage is that any text
submitted goes directly by the IETF itself which has the power to
approve/disapprove the assignment of ports.  For full details, see RFC
2418 "IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures"
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2418

It would be a much longer process getting to a BCP, a matter of years.
It would involve more people, the formalities are laborious and the
outcome is uncertain.  It is perfectly possible for the IETF to end up
saying No.

Given the procedural complexity of developing a BCP (Best Current
Practice), and the difficulty of transferring a port, I am personally
inclined to follow the suggestion from the RFC Editor, stay with an
informational RFC and follow the suggested path 1.  But this must be a
collective decision taken by the whole NUT project.

Roger