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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