On 03/25/2013 09:23 AM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
I think I at least partly disagree. The acknowledgements section of
RFCs was not, and to the best of my knowledge is not, concerned with
capturing the history of where specific changes or ideas came from.
It ought to be concerned with giving credit to folks who made
particularly large, but not authorship level, contributions to the
document.
I'm sure that everyone has their own practice WRT authorship,
contribution and acknowledgment, but this is my own of longstanding: if
a person contributes text that can be used as-is, w/o modification, I
list them as an author (unless they request otherwise); if a person
contributes text that is useful but requires editing to fit in, I list
them as a contributor; everyone else who at least makes a comment
(useful or not) gets listed in the "Acknowledgments" section. As an
aside, I have been occasionally scolded as "snarky" by ADs and others
for saying something like 'Thanks to...for (mostly) useful comments',
the parenthesized portion being the offensive one. Perhaps those people
live in a world where all comments are informed and useful; I only wish
that I did.
I have seen I-Ds which included change logs which made an effort to
capture the major changes to a document and their cause. these were,
at best, ungainly. And are, as far as I know, always removed before
publicaiton as an RFC.
Yours,
Joel
On 3/24/2013 8:55 PM, Abdussalam Baryun wrote:
Just to make things clear that the intention of documents
acknowledging is to reflect the truth of any document process and
connect information or resources. IMHO, it is not the purpose to show
credit to any person including authors, it is to show how changes were
developed and show true document-history.
So when I read a RFC I may go through the document process and its
draft versions, while going through the drafts related I see
acknowledged names so I may find the input on the list for such name.
In this way we have connections between inputs otherwise the IETF
system has no connection between its important information.
AB