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

2009-09-03 04:55:46
John,

we've had repeated examples
over the years of the IESG and/or individual ADs abusing the
independent submission process and/or the RFC Editor and zero
examples of the RFC Editor handling a request from the IESG
unreasonably or arbitrarily.

I don't want to open a discussion about who is more evil, particularly when opinions about any particular case probably differ. All I want to say about that is that as long as I have been looking, the score has been zero and zero on both sides. In particular, when I have been an AD it has always been a pleasure to work with the RFC Editor, and they have always made exactly the right decisions. In my honest opinion of course.

But I did want to bring up a couple of other angles. First of all, all the streams get their share of garbage. And sometimes the right decision is to publish the document despite it having some faults, or at least differences of opinion to established IETF practice. However, in such cases the notes that we are talking about really can be necessary (e.g., when a document redefines RADIUS Access-Reject as Access-Accept, to cite one real example from a few years back).

The second point was that in general, human organizations are prone to occasional failures. I at least prefer designs that are inherently capable of dealing with such failures (e.g., appeals path, way to fix a bad decision). However, I still want to see the RFC Editor as a simple journal-like function; please don't take my comment as an indication that board members should be selected by Nomcom, publication decisions should have public last calls or anything like that. We already have the IETF which runs in a community driven manner.

Jari

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