The LDP Working Group, created in May 2012, with an initial lifetime of 24 months, with a charter ending on 1 June 2014. The group is just about to publish the LDP Specification as a Candidate Recommendation and requests an extension of six months to progress this specification to Recommendation (until 1 December 2014). Note that the timetable is a bit stricter and aims at the Recommendation by the end of the summer 2014, but the extension leaves some room for assessing progress of other documents and dealing with possible shifts.

1 Status

The group has a healthy membership and a set of core participants (about 20) actively contributing to and and reviewing specifications. The mailing list archive (over 3,800 messages) and the tracker (98 issues, none of which remains open) are good indicators of the activity of the working group. Oracle, IBM, Fujitsu, the Apache Software Foundation and several others are active participants.

Most of the work of the group was delayed due to having to reconcile the use cases and requirements of two very different communities and important comments received as a result of the first Last Call required significant changes to the specification and a second Last Call. The whole WG is now supporting the resulting specification and several implementations are under way. The specification was approved to be published as a Candidate Recommendation by the Director.

There are two features ("paging" and "patch") which the group has been working on separately from the main specification, because they present certain additional technical challenges. The group would like to see these reach Recommendation during this extension period, but recognizes there is some chance this might not happen. The group does not have consensus on extending just for them, should they not reach Rec before the end of this extension period, and as such the group is prepared to leave them for a future group if necessary. Paging is scheduled for an LC2 decision on Monday and Patch should go to FPWD soon thereafter.

In addition, the WG has taken on the task of producing several documents to be published as WG Notes to help adoption of the LDP specification and prepare for future work. Now that the main specification is basically done these documents are the main focus of the WG and expected to be finalized in the coming months.

Finally, during the last 2 years the WG has developed a wish list of features to be standardized as a follow up to the LDP specification becoming a Recommendation. However, the WG is not sure whether such work should be started immediately or if some time should be given to gaining experience with the first specification before the WG reconvenes. WG members believe that the requested extension will give them a chance to reassess the situation in the fall and have a better idea as to whether the WG should be rechartered immediately or some time later.

2 Documents

3 References

WG Main page

WG Decision to request a 6 month extension

WG Charter