But, unless it contains significant and important information,
this stuff clutters up documents and, when there _is_ consensus
about the technical specification and publication, can
constitute the IESG saying "regardless of the community
consensus, we, the all-seeing and all-knowing IESG, know better
and are going to take advantage of our privileged position to
state our opinion of the document --not in a dissenting RFC
(which the IESG claims an absolute right to publish if they feel
like it), or in an IESG statement, but by changing the Standards
Track RFC itself. There may be situations where even that is
appropriate, but the question is what the limits are on this
mechanism being used, largely invisibly (unless, as Frank notes,
the author notices on AUTH48 and protests), and how far things
can descend, to use your words, toward "fairly petty concerns",
on the IESG's own authority.
well, yeah.
Though as the entire purpose of the note is, in some sense, to let the
IESG move on and get documents published when there remains disagreement
between the document author/editor/wg and IESG, a process that required
agreement on those notes would seem to defeat their purpose. And without
such notes, presumably more documents would be delayed. So I am having
a bit of trouble coming up with a process remedy that works better than
what we have now.