ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: RFC Errata: when to file, and when not to

2012-08-02 03:51:02
Hi Barry,

Could you refer to a RFC that states your below information or
procedure, if there is not, I recommend some one doing procedure
drafts to take it over. Please note that ALL reports from any
participant should be useful for IETF community and system. Even if
he/she misunderstood, this does not mean that he/she is not useful,
that means the IETF system/community needs to adjust to help
participants to understand and follow.

For me I will note your procedure so that I will not report wrongly,
but I will continue reporting my comments/views, and hope if some
thing is wrong I get a reply like your, thanking you,

AB
IETF Particpant
==================================================
The mission of the Internet Engineering Task Force is to make the
Internet work better by producing high-quality and relevant technical
documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the
Internet.
==================================================

We've been seeing a lot of inappropriate errata reports, made by
well-meaning people who, surely, think their reports are useful, even
important.  These aren't free: they take time to process, and they
form clutter in the errata system, obscuring the ones that do fit into
what errata are meant to be.


So I wanted to clarify what's meant to be reported, and what's not.


A valid erratum, one that the IESG will mark as "Verified", mets two
criteria:


1. It is truly an *error* in the original document.  That is, it would
have been considered an error *at the time the document was
published*, had it been noticed at the time.


2. It is important, an error that would cause someone to misread the
document in a significant way, causing implementation or deployment
problems, or other serious issues.


Criterion 1 means that anything that is "wrong" because of situations
or discussions that have come up since publication are not appropriate
errata.  Consider the differences among these:


- (a) Someone realizes that the document forgot to specify the valid
range of a value.


- (b) Someone realizes that the range specified did not correctly
reflect the result of the discussion at the time (the change got
missed and no one noticed).


- (c) Someone realizes that the range specified causes problems in
practice, but we didn't know that would happen when we published the
document.


(a) and (b) are valid errata, and should get marked as "Verified".
(c) is NOT valid for the errata system, and really ought to be marked
as "Rejected".


Criterion 2 means that minor typos are NOT appropriate errata.  The
IESG will mark these as "Held for Document Update", but, really, there
is no need to say that "an" should be "and", that a comma is missing
(unless it seriously affects the meaning and is likely to be
mis-read), or that "concensus" is misspelled (as here).  Again,
consider the differences:


- (a) "The server will now respond with an error code," where "now"
should have been "not".


- (b) "The server will not repond with an error code," where "repond"
should have been "respond".


- (c) "The server will not respond with and error code," where "and"
should have been "an".


(a) is the only valid one here.  There's no real value in recording
the others as errata.


In particular, the errata system is NOT meant to be used as an issue
tracker; please do not submit errata reports with the *intent* that
they be marked as "Held for Document Update", to be used as an issue
list later.  We have mailing lists, issue trackers, and wikis for this
purpose.


Barry, Applications AD