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Re: prohibiting RFC publication

2000-04-09 13:20:02
> For those who believe this, please check out the technical merit of
> draft-terrell-logic-analy-bin-ip-spec-ipv7-ipv8-05.txt, and ask
> yourselves if this should be published as an RFC.

It should not. See my message to Vernon. But it's not because it
lacks technical merit that it shouldn't be published.

> After that little exercise, you will appreciate that technical merit
> *is* a factor in deciding publication of an Experimental or
> Informational document.

Not if RFC 2026 is respected. I see nothing in 2026 allowing for this
possibility.

You need to look harder. From RFC 2026:

 RFC publication is the direct responsibility of the
RFC Editor, under the general direction of the IAB.
And from RFC 1601bis:

  The RFC Editor executes editorial management and publication of the
  IETF "Request for Comment" (RFC) document series, which is the
permanent document repository of the IETF.
This makes it clear that the RFC Editor exercises editorial control over the
RFC series, but doesn't specify exactly what editorial control means. However,
the RFC Editor has interpreted its editorial responsibilities as involving
review with the distinct possibility of not publishing documents not believed
to be worth publishing for at least as long as I've been involved in the IETF.

I can recall discussions regarding the RFC Editor's refusal to publish
documents as early as 1992. And I suspect the lateness of this date is simply
due to my not having been involved in the IETF prior to 1989, faulty memory on
my part, or both.

Once again RFC 2026 doesn't specify the criteria the RFC Editor uses to decide
not to publish. But speaking as an observer of the process for over a decade,
the criteria I've seen the RFC Editor apply to potential RFCs over the years
has most definitely included an assessment of technical merit, among other
things.

Now, in recent years the RFC Editor, rather than simply accepting contributions
directly from authors and publishing them without community input, has chosen
to use the Internet Drafts mechanism as a means of getting community input on
whether or not a given document should be published. This is what is happening
here.
I haven't always agreed with the RFC Editor's decision as to whether or not to
publish something (sometimes things have been published that I didn't think
were of sufficient quality, other times things have been rejected I didn't
think should have been), but I have never questioned the right of the RFC
Editor to refuse to publish something.

                                Ned



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