Jari
At a tangent to the discussion on the role of the RFC Editor, I note
that the style guide references TERMS, which is a Terms List for people
to use, e.g IPsec and not IPSec.
Calling a WG TERM but having it look at what is for me a very different
aspect to terminology, inclusiveness, seems to me to be a good source of
confusion in times to come.
Tom Petch
On 13/04/2021 17:44, Jari Arkko wrote:
Brian,
I believe that the charter is good enough as it is, but I also believe
that the IESG should consider not only whether there is consensus on the
charter text, but also the basic question whether this issue should be
handled by the IETF at all, rather than by the RFC Editor.
I think that’s a good question.
I have a view on that, and interestingly I came to a different conclusion than you did. Perhaps it would be useful to talk about this a bit further.
So, my reasoning is that the right place for most IETF decisions is at the working groups. (Subject to some common policies and full IETF review, of course, as discussed in the other thread…)
I could imagine RFC Editor adjusting text in a security considerations section that talked about some filtering and used older versions of “denylist” in the text. But I’m not sure I’d want the RFC Editor to adjust a major term picked by a working group in their protocol, particularly when the change may cause differences between a new RFC and older RFCs to occur. I’d want the WG to make that determination. For an example, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-rfc8446bis-00#section-1.2 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-rfc8446bis-00#section-1.2>
All this leads me to believe that the WGs are and should be in charge of the bigger modifications. This still leaves room for:
- a new terminology working group to provide guidance & principles
- RFC editor to check and adjust text (and possibly highlight issues back to the authors)*
Brian, what was your thought regarding the division of work and who would do what? And in your mind, what level of decisions would be required for actions similar the examples above?
Jari
*) Lars’ working group proposal does not involve the working group actually developing a list of terms. That too could possibly be a thing that the RFC Editor could do. But of course the community could do it also, as volunteers in some design-team like activity, or we could find an entirely external resource that is updated with information.
