--On tirsdag, november 30, 2004 12:13:41 -0500 Michael StJohns
<mstjohns(_at_)mindspring(_dot_)com> wrote:
Folks -
I've recently been asked to review a number of works in progress related
to restructuring and other similar things. Those documents were
liberally splattered with references to various IDs
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-newtrk-cruft-00.txt,
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-newtrk-repurposing-isd-00.
txt, http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-wasserman-iasa-bcp-01.txt
etc). Its unclear that either the work in progress or the cited drafts
will ever be published as RFCs.
The answer is yes-if-successful, yes-if-consensus, yes-with-namechange for
those three particular documents. Not much different from the I-Ds of any
given working group.
Its also unclear that this
(restructuring etc) will be resolved within the 6 month lifetime of any
given ID. Its also unclear that we can afford to either have these
expire, or continually resubmit them. And finally, we NEED to have this
set of documents as permanent archivable documents to maintain the
historical record.
Query: What purpose do you see the historical record as having?
I'm serious - "visibility to serious historians", "historical sunshine law"
and "armoury for lawyers in court cases" are very different things to
design for.
It seems to me that neither ID status nor RFC status are appropriate for
these documents. The ID series is, by design, ephemeral and generally
not citeable. The RFC series is stable and citeable, but the lead time
for introducing an RFC is somewhat north of 30 days or more.
Optimist.... the current queue time (approval to publication) is closer to
4 months for IETF standards track. The effort at speeding up the IESG
approval process has had ripple effects :-(
(that's why the RFC Editor's 2006 budget shows a hefty increase, btw...)
I hate to open Pandora's box, but what I think we need is a citable,
stable document series that has a production lead time similar to that of
the IDs. I would probably limit this to the non-technical administrivia
we've been recently inundated with.
Unfortunately, almost the same arguments can be made for anything that has
received serious attention in the I-D series. See the NEWTRK discussion
about "working group snapshot".
Harald
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