Kurt,
--On 26. mars 2004 18:14 -0800 "Kurt D. Zeilenga"
<Kurt(_at_)OpenLDAP(_dot_)org> wrote:
At 05:35 PM 3/26/2004, Eliot Lear wrote:
Personally, I'm more concerned by WGs demanding their right to
have their half-baked specifications published as RFCs, and the
for IESG to approve them without any IETF review or other
community review, or (as has happened in the past) even when
substantial oversights or design flaws in those specifications
were pointed out by individuals.
Please cite an example.
That, I think, would be counter productive. I think it fairly
apparent that there is a fair amount of crap (by mine, your, or
anyone's opinion) published as RFCs. I content that much of
that crap was produced by the IETF.
permit me to disagree..... not with your core statement, but with the
statement that citing examples would be counterproductive.
The statement that "a fair amount of crap is published as RFCs" has been
repeated for so long that it's almost become a mantra.
However, in my opinion, for *every single one* of those RFCs, there's a
reason why it was published. Usually there was a supporting constituency,
and at least some opinion that publishing it was better for the Internet
than not publishing it - certainly, for every standards-track RFC, there
was at one time a majority view in the IESG that such was the case.
If we are to change the process that produces this stuff, we HAVE to
understand what the reasons are that reasonable, competent people produce
things that are sub-par, broken or "crap". And IMHO, we can't do that
without saying what these unacceptable results of the process are.
Moving from the generic to the specific might actually be an useful
catharsis for the community - and just might change the community opinion
from "a lot of our 3000 RFCs are crap" to "there are 30 bad RFCs, 300 that
could have been better and 3000 reasonably OK ones", or even to "the
quality control system does not work well enough, there are too many
borderline cases".
I don't think anonymous, class-based criticism will get us much further. We
need to be specific about what our problems are.
Harald