Dave Crocker wrote:
And of course, the reality is that we allow bad specs out the door all
the time; we just allow fewer of them than many/most other standards
bodies...
But different to (at least some) other standards bodies, we lack an
official means to publish defect reports (aka errata) to document defects
in a _timely_(!!) fashion. (Timely = can be found where the RFC says
that it can be found, and within at most a few weeks after the
defect/omission has been found by an implementor).
In theory, we have the errata process, and recent RFC even include
a direct URL pointer to the RFC-Editors errata page on the title page:
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfcXXXX.
("XXXX" containing the real number of the RFC on which this appears).
However, the Errata process is currently working poorly, primarily
because a number of folks (including some IETF leadership) currently
thinks that posting something a trivial as a missing vital one-line
clarification to a published RFC as a "substantial change" that can
only be performed by publishing a whole new RFC.
-Martin