----- Original Message ----- From: "John Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> To: <ietf@xxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2019 4:20 PM Subject: Re: Comments on draft-roach-bis-documents-00 > In article <F5B1D471CB679CF8B803F0CE@PSB> you write: > >Of course, one could modify/update 2026 to match the intent of > >this I-D, but I assume that would be considered a much more > >major step. > > While not wanting to derail the ongoing conversation, this topic is > making me think that we have a lot of processes that we never change > for little more reason than that we've never changed them. Here's > two that this discussion makes me think of: > > There's the question of what authors to put on a bis document since > the original authors may have lost interest or in some cases died. Give both and their relationship. I would say that this is quite common within the IETF as in e.g. RFC2579. I do not think that there is a formal way of doing this but I find the meaning clear. Tom Petch > Academic papers often identify one or two of a long list of authors as > the corresponding authors, to whom you write if you have questions or > comments. The five author limit apparently dates from a desire that > all of the listed authors be the corresponding ones, but that was when > everyone was a lot younger. Even if we keep the limit at five, > putting a star next to one or two of them wouldn't be that hard. > > More radically, the theory that RFCs never change dates from when they > were on paper and nobody wanted to find all the copies and apply > whiteout. While I don't think it would be a good idea to have > different documents floating around all called, say, RFC 3514, we > could call revised versions 3514.1 and 3514.2 like other SDOs do and > the world wouldn't come to an end. > > Again I am not suggesting we stop thinking about this draft, but I do > think we should try and recognize places where we are working around > our processes rather than our processes working for us. > > R's, > John >
