Hi,
I welcome the initiative here, as I believe inter-SDO interactions should not be governed by the comparatively unstable collective opinion of the IESG de jour.
However, I do not believe the document should be published in its current form.
A few suggestions regarding section 2 that address my main concerns:
- The first bullet is, I think, too subjective to provide guidance. It’s also decoupled from the rest of section 2. Perhaps keep the bullet in its own
(sub-) section and add soft guidance: “If doubts are raised about the quality of the development process of possible normative reference, explicit WG consensus is required to the contrary.”.
- Regarding the second and third bullets, think the IETF MUST avoid normatively referencing documents that may be in URLs with dubious location stability,
or unexpected revision in situ, especially when those revisions would not be backward compatible. If we allow (in contrast to be silent about) such normative references, we may well run into problems in seeing our RFCs being referenced upstream, as they could
be viewed as unstable. I would remove those two bullets. Long-term, the IETF can perhaps consider providing technical means to allow an organization to put snapshots of their unstable docs on the IETF servers to create a stable, referenceable version—without
going through RFC publishing processes.
- It has already been commented that the term “freely available” of the fourth bullet, as implied in the remainder of the section 2, is not consistent
with what the term historically meant. Therefore, I suggest renaming “freely available” to something like “available only against paying customary per document fee”. Wordsmith that as you see fit to make sure the language does not apply to paying consortium/SDO
membership fees or similar. The guidance here is indeed making the document, or a technically equivalent document, available to reviewers, without requiring wider availability. However, please add “upon named reviewer request”, and add something like “reasonable
precautions against malicious distribution beyond named reviewers, such as personalized watermarking, is OK.” (I mention this because that topic did come up in the ISO/IEC context and may well become a requirement in the foreseeable future.
Thanks,
Stephan
From: The IESG <iesg-secretary@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, May 10, 2024 at 08:51
To: IETF-Announce <ietf-announce@xxxxxxxx>
Cc: draft-kucherawy-bcp97bis@xxxxxxxx <draft-kucherawy-bcp97bis@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Last Call: <draft-kucherawy-bcp97bis-05.txt> (Procedure for Standards Track Documents to Refer Normatively to External Documents) to Best Current Practice
The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider the
following document: - 'Procedure for Standards Track Documents to Refer
Normatively to
External Documents'
<draft-kucherawy-bcp97bis-05.txt> as Best Current Practice
The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final
comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
last-call@xxxxxxxx mailing lists by 2024-06-07. Exceptionally, comments may
be sent to iesg@xxxxxxxx instead. In either case, please retain the beginning
of the Subject line to allow automated sorting.
Abstract
This document specifies a procedure for referencing external
standards and specifications from IETF-produced documents on the
Standards Track. In doing so, it updates BCP 9 (RFC 2026).
The file can be obtained via
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kucherawy-bcp97bis/
No IPR declarations have been submitted directly on this I-D.
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