On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 2:35 AM tom petch <daedulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The terminology I find unhelpful; the document cries out for a section
on Terminology. In most places, I do not know what the document is
referring to. Thus when it talks of what must be in an RFC, I think
good, I can ignore all this as it is up to the RFC Editor to add
annotating text! It may be of course that the text here means to refer
to I-D, as at Last Call, as well but that is not what it says. Likewise
the word standard appears in many places. Most on this list will know
what a Standard is; is that intended or does it mean a document on the
standards track which most on this list will know is different? And the
focus seems to be RFC ignoring the role of I-D in the IETF process. The
document introduces the concept of source document and target document
for clarity and then fails to use them when clarity is called for. And
then most will be familiar with Normative and Informative; here the
author uses normative and informative. Are they intended to have the
same meaning? Who knows (apart from the author:-)?
Very little of the text here is changed from the other documents that already comprise BCP 97. Those definitions aren't there now; we generally seem to know what those terms mean. Perhaps the text expects familiarity with RFC 2026 (a normative reference), which defines some of them, and the rest are defined in this document ("normative" and "informative" are described in Section 1.1, for instance) or in the Guidelines for I-D Authors. We could add a reference to the latter if people think that would be helpful.
I'd be happy to add a Terminology section if we think it's needed, but I'm wary of the risk of definitions here and those elsewhere diverging.
To me it is symptomatic that an example is made of a MIB when the IESG
made YANG the standard for network management many years ago and the
example would have exactly the same force were it to refer to YANG
(RFC8407).
I have already asked for (and now received) some text to replace that reference.
-MSK
