--On Wednesday, 27 September, 2006 23:22 -0400 Sam Hartman
<hartmans-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> I support the textual descriptions of the changes Eliot made.
> However I'm concerned that as with any effort to revise RFC
> 2026, there will llikely be changes in wording that have
> unintended consequences. I am not personally convinced that
> the value of revising RFC 2026 justifies the risk of problems
> in these changes.
I share this concern. See below.
> I'm quite convinced that if we choose to revise RFC 2026 we
> should do so with a small set of goal changes--probably no
> more than Eliot and Scott have proposed. I will resist adding
> my pet improvements to 2026 to the list. I encourage others
> who don't want this effort to drown under its own weight to do
> the same.
While I agree with that, I suggest that we are in something of a
conundrum. Right now, 2026 is badly out of date in a number of
areas. It reflects procedures and modes that we no longer
follow, only a fraction of which are addressed by Eliot's draft.
There is general community understanding and acceptance that we
are operating, not by the letter of 2026, but by the combination
of 2026 and a certain amount of, largely undocumented, oral
tradition (I expect to hear from the usual suspects on that
assertion, but it is the way it is). To make things worse, we
have some BCPs that effectively amend 2026 but that are not
referenced in Eliot's draft -- I've pointed out some of them to
him, which I assume will be fixed, but may have missed others.
If we produce a 2026bis that does not address some of those
changes in procedure, we risk getting ourselves into a royal
mess in which it isn't clear whether the authority for unchanged
sections is 2026-as-modified, 2026-plus-oral-tradition, or
whether the new document reinstates the long-abandoned
procedures. That situation could easily bury us in procedural
lawyers (probably the usual amateurs) and dickering... and we
have enough of those problems already, at least IMO.
I suggest, that if we are going to try to replace 2026 with this
sort of incremental change, the new document needs to be
organized in one of two ways:
(1) Every single section or subsection that is unchanged, and
most of those that are not completely rewritten to conform
exactly to current practice or deliberately changed to create a
new authority contain an explicit disclaimer that indicates that
the document does not change, reinstate, or ratify the
historical combination of 2026, formal and informal updates, and
contemporary practice and that the text is included merely for
convenience. That would be ugly. It would also be something we
have never done before and it is not clear to me that starting
it with 2026bis would be a good idea. But it might do the job.
(2) 2026bis, itself, is reduced to nothing more than a list of
section headings, each one pointing to the document where the
authoritative material for that section can be found, probably
with appropriate disclaimers about some portions of 2026. Such
a document would not update any section of 2026, deliberately or
accidentally, that it did not intend to update and would not
drop us into the conundrum. It would make "the procedures
manual" into a lot more documents, but that has advantages as
well as disadvantages. It would also have the small advantage
that the substantive changes Eliot proposes --such as the move
to a two-step standards process-- could be processed, and
consensus demonstrated, separately, on their own rather than
entangled with each other and with the 2026 revision.
I don't see how we can get real consensus any other way,
especially in the presence of community burnout with process
issues (my perception) and the fears that many of us share about
inadvertent changes to sections that don't get careful attention.
Just my opinion.
john
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