--On 26. mars 2004 18:14 -0800 "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At 05:35 PM 3/26/2004, Eliot Lear wrote:Please cite an example.Personally, I'm more concerned by WGs demanding their right to have their half-baked specifications published as RFCs, and the for IESG to approve them without any IETF review or other community review, or (as has happened in the past) even when substantial oversights or design flaws in those specifications were pointed out by individuals.
That, I think, would be counter productive. I think it fairly apparent that there is a fair amount of crap (by mine, your, or anyone's opinion) published as RFCs. I content that much of that crap was produced by the IETF.
permit me to disagree..... not with your core statement, but with the statement that citing examples would be counterproductive.
The statement that "a fair amount of crap is published as RFCs" has been repeated for so long that it's almost become a mantra.
However, in my opinion, for *every single one* of those RFCs, there's a reason why it was published. Usually there was a supporting constituency, and at least some opinion that publishing it was better for the Internet than not publishing it - certainly, for every standards-track RFC, there was at one time a majority view in the IESG that such was the case.
If we are to change the process that produces this stuff, we HAVE to understand what the reasons are that reasonable, competent people produce things that are sub-par, broken or "crap". And IMHO, we can't do that without saying what these unacceptable results of the process are.
Moving from the generic to the specific might actually be an useful catharsis for the community - and just might change the community opinion from "a lot of our 3000 RFCs are crap" to "there are 30 bad RFCs, 300 that could have been better and 3000 reasonably OK ones", or even to "the quality control system does not work well enough, there are too many borderline cases".
I don't think anonymous, class-based criticism will get us much further. We need to be specific about what our problems are.
Harald