On Friday, Jan 31, 2003, at 16:06 America/Montreal, someone wrote:
ASIDE:What this points out is that the relationship between IESG review, IANA assignments and RFC editor independence is both complex and subtle. Not suprisingly, it has evolved over time in a way that no longer matches the exact words in (say) 2026. A literal intepretation of some of these words could easily lead us into situations that we probably don't want to be in. I agree that it would be good to clarify and update the written words.
An operational bug at present is that while the RFCs clearly state
that the IAB is responsible for the RFC-Editor relationship, the
actual practice is largely that IESG (and NOT IAB) is providing
direction to the RFC-Editor (even on matters not involving the
output of IETF WGs nor involving standards-track publication).
I think that this is a significant problem that does need to be fixed.
The two most obvious forms of fix are to re-align the practice to
match the RFC language or to revise the RFC language to match the
actual practice. Other solutions probably also exist. I don't
claim to know what the right fix is.
This discrepancy really IS a problem and one way or another needs
to be fixed.
It is NOT just an IETF issue, so IETF can't solve it unilaterally.
IRTF, IAB, and other ISoc-umbrella groups that do NOT report to IESG
nor report directly to the IETF also use (and need to continue to use)
the RFC-Editor to publish documents.
My personal preference would be that this bug get sorted out with
full input from the broader IETF community, IRTF community, and "other
folks who publish RFCs" community [1], rather than being worked
out behind closed doors.
Ran
rja@extremenetworks.com
[1] Those communities each overlap, but they are NOT identical in practice.