Hi.
After a number of discussions, some of them off-list, with Adam
Roach and others, in the last month or so, I've just posted an
I-D. That I-D is a personal analysis and critique of the
practice of publishing Informational RFCs in the IETF Stream
(or, for that matter, any other Stream) that appear to update
standards track documents without actually being updates and a
few closely-related issues. It seems to me that publication of
such documents in the IETF Stream creates a greater opportunity
for confusion about what is and is not a standard and with its
status is than almost anything that could be done in another
stream, particularly because the boilerplate of IETF Stream
documents asserts that the represent IETF Consensus and
documents coming from the other Streams explicitly disclaim that.
The I-D is intended to provide a more in-depth analysis of some
of the issues that I understand motivated
draft-roach-bis-document, but the latter addresses only a
subset of the issues the I-D identifies. It also raises the
question of whether the type of documents it critiques and their
implications indicate that it is time to reopen some of the
questions about identification about what is and is not part of
a standard that were discussed in NEWTRK more than a decade ago.
This is a personal critique. While it makes some suggestions
that the community might want to examine, it does not attempt to
set any sort of policy. My expectation is to hand it off to the
ISE after it has had a chance to ripen a bit. If the IESG or
particular ADs believe it should be in the IETF Stream, I'm
happy to discuss that but with the understanding that, were it
adopted as part of an IETF policy, I'd expect the IESG to start
moving documents that violate its principles to Historic (at
least) and to not allow any new documents of that sort. As an
Independent Stream critique, the question of whether policy
actions should be built on top of it and what those should be
remain, as it were, independent.
Comments welcome but, unless they address the question of
whether or why it should be processed in the IETF Stream, they
should probably be addressed to me personally rather than to the
IETF list. Please retain enough of the subject line that I can
spot comments easily
best,
john
