On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 08/10/2013 08:03, Ted Hardie wrote:
...
were. On the second point, the truth is that informational RFCs are
[not]
treated as actual requests for comments much any more, but are taken as
fixed;
I've inserted the "not" that Ted certainly intended.
Indeed, thanks for the correction.
But I think he raises
an important point. If the phrase "Request For Comments" no longer means
what it says, we need another RFC, with a provisional title of
"Request For Comments Means What It Says".
We still see comments on RFC 791 reasonably often, and I see comments
on RFC 2460 practically every day. That's as it should be.
And what are the RFC numbers for the comments? If none, as I suspect, then
the comments aren't the same status as the documents--that's fine for RFC
791 and 2460, but it is not clear that Pete's document falls into the same
class. I would argue it does not.
So I'd like to dispute Ted's point that by publishing a version of
resnick-on-consensus as an RFC, we will engrave its contents in stone.
If that's the case, we have an even deeper problem than misunderstandings
of rough consensus.
Archival may not mean "engraved in stone", but it does impute status. If
we want, as a community, to create an archival document on this topic, then
we should take on the work. Pete's document is a good spark for the
conversation that might kick off that work, but I personally don't think it
is a good output document for that; if it is meant to be a spark, I don't
see why moving it into
an archival series is useful for us at this stage.
regards,
Ted
otoh Ted's specific points on the draft are all valuable.
Brian