On 27-mrt-04, at 18:36, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
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.
[...]
I don't think anonymous, class-based criticism will get us much
further. We need to be specific about what our problems are.
To me it seems that the IETF can't make up its mind: are RFCs just
drafts that don't expire, or are they hugely important documents that
must be absolutely perfect before they are published?
The problem is version control. We're engineers. That means we are,
more so than mere mortals, doomed never to get anything right the first
time out. However, the RFC publishing model doesn't really allow for
incremental changes: you have to write a completely new RFC, which then
gets a new number that has no relation to the original RFC.
What we need is a way to add information to RFCs whithout the need to
rewrite the original RFC or make the new information a full-blown RFC
of its own.