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Re: draft-housley-iesg-rfc3932bis and the optional/mandatory nature of IESG notes

2009-08-31 12:06:10
Before commenting on the question, I wish to comment slightly on the exposition. While I understand that some IESG members were surprised that the text brought to them treated IESG notes as a recommendation to the RFC Editor, such surprise gap in historical information rather than a change. That text was not a change in practice. The documented rules and practice has long been that with regard to Independent Submissions the IESG notes are a request / recommendation to the RFC Editor (soon to be ISE), not a statement of what will be included in the result.

Based on having seen a number of IESG notes, and reading the resulting text and its inherent tone, I would strongly prefer that IESG notes be an exception. Also, I believe that the stream identification and associated indications are quite sufficient for the normal case. Unless we wish to deliberately denigrate the Independent Submissions tream, we should not be putting extra notes on the front of them. I consider the Independent Stream to be an important source of information and commentary that helps the overall internet process, and would be very unhappy to see it denigrated.

Thus, I strongly prefer (a). I prefer that such notes be rare, and that they remain recommendations to the ISE.

Even if the IAB were to agree that such notes should be common, I would strongly recommend that the tone and content of such notes remain at the discretion of the ISE. Otherwise, there is no true Independent series.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

Jari Arkko wrote:
I would like to get some further input from the community on this draft.

But first some background. This draft was brought to a second last call in June because several IESG members felt uncomfortable with the IESG notes being used only in exceptional circumstances. I asked Russ to prepare the -07 version. This version allowed notes to be used at the IESG's discretion and suggested that the linkage (or lack thereof) to IETF work would typically be explained in the note. This version was taken to the second last call.

While the number of comments we received was small, after the last call was over I determined that the consensus was against this change. As a result, I asked Russ to prepare the -08 version. This version goes back to the "exceptional" wording from -06, but incorporated a number of editorial corrections that had been made in interim. I also took the draft back to the IESG telechat last week. The IESG was not extremely pleased with the new version, but my understanding is that they were willing to accept the changes. However, a new issue was brought up: one of the changes that Russ and I felt was editorial highlighted the fact that the document makes the IESG notes a recommendation to the RFC Editor, not something that would automatically always be applied to the published RFC. Some IESG members were concerned about this, and preferred the latter.

And now back to the input that I wanted to hear. I would like to get a sense from the list whether you prefer (a) that any exceptional IESG note is just a recommendation to the RFC Editor or (b) something that is always applied to the published RFC. Please reply before the next IESG meeting on September 10. Some e-mails on this topic have already been sent in the Last Call thread -- I have seen those and there is no need to resend.

(For the record my own slight preference is b. But I have to say that I think the document has been ready to be shipped from version -06, and its unfortunate that we're not there yet, particularly since this document is holding up the implementation of the new headers and boilerplates system for independent submissions, IRTF submissions and IETF submissions. I will exhaust all possible means of getting this approved in the next meeting, as soon as I know what the community opinion is.)

Jari Arkko

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