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Re: Complaints Against The IESG and The RFC-Editor About Publication of RFC-2188 (ESRO)

2006-03-19 06:10:01
  Harald> The IESG pointed some of the issues out to the RFC Editor, who handled
  Harald> the communication with the author; that was the procedure at that 
time.
  Harald> Nevertheless, the RFC Editor felt that the document was worthy of
  Harald> publication, and published anyway.

As the written record clearly shows, this is
factually incorrect.

In the case of RFC-2188 the RFC Editor was no more
than an IESG puppet. Publication was held up for
more than 7 months, until finally Scott Bradner
(Transport Area Director at the IESG) made it
happen -- emphatically *not* the RFC Editor. Scott
can step in, if he wishes.

I will go on record to say that I was the IESG member who did the most to discourage publication of your document as an RFC. Contrary to your perception of things, the RFC Editor published it over my strong objections, and also insisted on diluting the IESG note that was originally written for that document. I don't recall the reasons for the delay other than the high workload of IESG (we were reviewing dozens of documents per week, the fact that IESG discussed things in conference calls every two weeks, and there were several iterations of back-and-forth with the RFC Editor regarding your document. It is my recollection that your document was handled much more quickly than working group documents -- because unlike WG documents which proceeded normally though the IESG's queue (and for which the speed of processing was sensitive to IESG's workload), the RFC Editor had a policy of giving IESG a limited amount of time to comment on independent submissions that had the perverse side-effect of giving priority to those submissions.

It was and still is my opinion that RFC 2188 was not suitable for publication as an RFC, as it is poorly designed and has numerous technical flaws. To have published this document IMHO dilutes the quality of the RFC series and may confer an undeserved appearance of acceptance on ESRO. Perhaps more importantly, the discussion about this document wasted a colossal amount of time that could have been put to much better use reviewing working group output (on the part of the IESG) and editing better quality documents (on the part of the RFC Editor).

As Harald points out, this was eight years ago, and the process has changed significantly since that time. Also, I'm no longer on the IESG and don't expect to ever be on the IESG again. Life is too short. Since all of the circumstances and nearly all of the people have changed since this incident, I don't see how it's relevant now.

Keith


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