--On Saturday, July 04, 2015 11:34 +0200 Patrik Fältström <paf@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> They're still opaque identifiers, so the format isn't >> important. I don't know how to make that any clearer. > > Because they have been published, we immediately have a > question about persistence. We can now, from my perspective, > not change the format as they have already been included in > the RFC Index. Its a persistence issue. > > We COULD have changed the format, discussed it, or whatever, > but that point in time is passed. This is one of the points I've been trying to make. The issue for me is not, and hasn't been, whether we should assign DOIs to the RFC Series or not -- I really don't care. And it isn't "surprise" because, as Heather points out, it wasn't hard to know that a decision had been taken to "do DOIs" and that _some_ DOI arrangements were underway. I am more concerned about the decisions that lead to this "decide first, make irrevocable decisions about details (or just let them happen), deploy, and _then_ ask for review. And that leads exactly to Patrik's comment about what we "COULD" have done above. Picking just one example, Heather's note pointed to the September 2014 SOW (http://iaoc.ietf.org/documents/Announce-RFC-DOI-SOW-3Sep14.pdf if anyone wants to look at the action text rather than the announcement) but it does not contain a word about the choice of the particular format for the suffix. Similarly, not only was that March 2014 call for review a call for comments to the rfc-interest list (not even to the IAB) but there is nothing in it that implies that it is a major decision point about the details -- at that stage in the development of things, or even at the time of the September SOW, it was reasonable (at least IMO) to interpret the DOI format in the draft as a placeholder to be discussed later. Normally, "comment to a WG list" or "comment to other than the IAB or IETF lists" implies a request for review and comments but that the community will get another chance to review before the final decision point. And normally we don't treat SOWs, even SOWs that _do_ include the precise details, as decision documents about issues that, once decide, have broad impact and are irreversible. If the intention here was to make those announcements of decision points, then they should have been, again IMO, much more clear about it. Sure, people could have noticed those lines and said "I certainly hope you are not planning to use DOI: 10.NNNNN/rfcNNNN as the suffix format" but should have been no expectation that not doing so was support for a final decision, any more than failure to study an I-D that lies largely outside one's major area of interest and comment, to a list associated with it, creates a binding decision that cannot be questioned or even reversed on IETF Last Call. Had someone asked the community the question "does DOI: 10.17487/RFCnnnn look like a satisfactory suffix format", we COULD have had that review as Patrik suggests (and many others of us have suggested in other ways). I will defend a decision like that suffix format one as one that the RFC Series Editor can make and announce to the community, subject to whatever oversight the IAB (directly or via the RSOC) chooses to apply. But that implies that the RSE needs to be accountable for such decisions -- both their substance and the details of the analysis that went into them. What I expected to hear from Heather was "these are the tradeoffs we considered and why the decision was made this way" not "this should not have been a surprise". While it is not yet irreversible, I think one can have a very similar discussion about the messaging involved relative to other work and identifiers. For example, I think some of this discussion, including the RSOC and IAB openness to adding more identifiers, ought to be in this document, making clear that DOIs may be the first (actually second, given RFC 2648) in a series rather than an IETF/ IAB/ RFC Editor commitment to one particular system. That sort of issue is what calls for comment are supposed to be about. john