JEP types (was: Re: [Members] Motion for Last Call on JEP 88)

[Peter Saint-Andre]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 06:46:58AM -0600, Ryan Eatmon wrote:

> My fear about making this a standard is that it's a standard that not 
> everyone can meet.
> 
> 
> Maybe we need a third track.  Optional standards.  A standardized way of 
> doing something without making it part of the official Jabber standard.
> 
> But really...  That's what informational is meant to be.  I had to 
> figure something out, here it is, you can freely use it as a standard.

Last fall the Council discussed the issue of standards track vs.
informational, and I've recently captured that discussion in an 
updated version of JEP-0001:

http://www.jabber.org/~stpeter/editor/0001.html#types

On that model, *any* protocol JEP would be Standards Track, whereas 
an Informational JEP would define best practices regarding protocol 
development, a usage profile of an existing protocol, or policies and 
procedures for the JSF.

However, saying that all protocol JEPs are Standards Track does not
imply that all JEPs apply to all implementations. For example, some
protocols might be implemented only by servers and components, some
might be implemented only by clients (or certain kinds of clients), 
and so on.

In order to define which protocols must be implemented, I think it is
worth bringing back the Protocol Suite JEPs:

JEP-0073: Basic IM Protocol Suite
          http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0073.html

JEP-0117: Advanced IM Protocol Suite
          http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0117.html

Publishing these would assist developers in knowing which protocols 
they really need to implement, and which protocols are optional.

Peter