At 8:45 AM -0700 4/17/08, Lisa Dusseault wrote:
I can assure you, I at least was anticipating that the IESG (and
other people handling errata) would be doing *more* work in
classifying errata if we have the three categories.
OK, good. (Well, not good that you were asking for more work...)
The goal as I see it is to avoid presenting 50 errata on an RFC to a
user, without any sorting or focus, when only three of them are
crucial to interoperability. If we overwhelm implementors with more
than a page worth of errata, most of which are junk, implementors
will be well justified in ignoring errata.
That's a judgement call, one that I would disagree with. It is easy
to skim a long errata list to weed out the typos; many of us do this
all the time with the errata for important books we rely on. Even a
list of 50 (which would be an outlier, I suspect) could be reviewed
in less than half an hour.
An important part of the errata handling, therefore, is to make the
difference clear to the implementor. When an implementor clicks
"Errata" for an RFC, they should see the short-list of crucial
errata and at the end, a link to "Other possible errata" (or other
wording). With that kind of interface, I don't think readers of
errata need to care about the exact difference between categories:
the essential difference, to them, is which ones have been brought
to their immediate attention.
That seems OK. However, it is far from clear that the amount of
effort it will take for the IESG, document authors, WG chairs, and so
on to make that differentiation is worth it: any serious implementer
is going to look at both lists anyway to be sure that we didn't
mis-categorize something important into the second list. I guess I'm
arguing for less work for all of us at the expense of a bit more
categorizing of importance for the implementers.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
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