--On tirsdag, november 30, 2004 12:13:41 -0500 Michael StJohns <mstjohns@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Folks -
I've recently been asked to review a number of works in progress related to restructuring and other similar things. Those documents were liberally splattered with references to various IDs (http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-newtrk-cruft-00.txt, http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-newtrk-repurposing-isd-00. txt, http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-wasserman-iasa-bcp-01.txt etc). Its unclear that either the work in progress or the cited drafts will ever be published as RFCs.
The answer is yes-if-successful, yes-if-consensus, yes-with-namechange for those three particular documents. Not much different from the I-Ds of any given working group.
Its also unclear that this (restructuring etc) will be resolved within the 6 month lifetime of any given ID. Its also unclear that we can afford to either have these expire, or continually resubmit them. And finally, we NEED to have this set of documents as permanent archivable documents to maintain the historical record.
Query: What purpose do you see the historical record as having?
I'm serious - "visibility to serious historians", "historical sunshine law" and "armoury for lawyers in court cases" are very different things to design for.
It seems to me that neither ID status nor RFC status are appropriate for these documents. The ID series is, by design, ephemeral and generally not citeable. The RFC series is stable and citeable, but the lead time for introducing an RFC is somewhat north of 30 days or more.
Optimist.... the current queue time (approval to publication) is closer to 4 months for IETF standards track. The effort at speeding up the IESG approval process has had ripple effects :-(
(that's why the RFC Editor's 2006 budget shows a hefty increase, btw...)
I hate to open Pandora's box, but what I think we need is a citable, stable document series that has a production lead time similar to that of the IDs. I would probably limit this to the non-technical administrivia we've been recently inundated with.
Unfortunately, almost the same arguments can be made for anything that has received serious attention in the I-D series. See the NEWTRK discussion about "working group snapshot".
Harald
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