John C Klensin wrote:
I wonder if we are reading the same document.
We are. But you read it rather carefully than I...
While the
comments below highlight the differences from BCPs that seem
most important to me, it appears to me that these differences,
and others, appear fairly clearly in section 5 of the I-D.
What I noted in section 5 was that the first part listed existing
choices and the second part listed reasons not to use them, notably
missing reference to BCPs. what I missed was that the first part
included some cryptic dismissals of existing mechanisms, too.
The reasons the document offers for not using BCP status are:
1. usually a great deal of debate and effort to change
2. bind up editing resources in the final edit stage
3. as well as being limited (in practice) to ASCII
4. not available for Info documents
5. "updates/obsoletes" ...can also be quite confusing to follow
Does anyone think that the new mechanism will not suffer #1 and #2?
#3 is a universal issue; if anything, IETF process documents need more powerful font and
graphics capabilities less than our more interesting technical specifications, so it is
difficult to guess why this new mechanisms warrants a new formatting convention.
#4 is the interesting objection, because it appears to have real substance. However
the new series is for operations documents, not "informational" ones.
#5 implies that the updates/obsolets mechanism is generally problematic, but I do not
recall hearing about this before. Is there some undercurrent of community dissatisfaction
with it?
On reflection, the proposal could easily be taken as intended to begin an end-run around the RFC
editor process. If indeed the RFC Editor process is problematic for IETF documents, then we
need to worry about it more for our primary output than our internal process
documents.
And, by the way, the premise of the proposal is that we need to be more agile in being able to
produce process documents.
As if producing new and different process documents is somehow a current
problem in the IETF???
d/
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