On 16/12/2015 17:47, IAB Executive Administrative Manager wrote:
This is an announcement of an IETF-wide Call for Comment on
draft-iab-rfc5741bis-01.
The document is being considered for publication as an Informational RFC
within the IAB stream, and is available for inspection here:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iab-rfc5741bis/
The Call for Comment will last until 2016-01-13. Please send comments to
iab(_at_)iab(_dot_)org.
Abstract
RFC documents contain a number of fixed elements such as the title
page header, standard boilerplates and copyright/IPR statements.
This document describes them and introduces some updates to reflect
current usage and requirements of RFC publication. In particular,
this updated structure is intended to communicate clearly the source
of RFC creation and review. This document obsoletes RFC 5741, moving
detailed content to an IAB web page and preparing for more flexible
output formats.
I welcome this attempt to clarify the status of RFCs that are published by
differing routes. The point of my comment here is to ask if it might be
appropriate to extend the clarification provided to include the effect of IANA
considerations actions in RFCs from various streams (that request registrations
that are commonly associated with standards actions).
My comments here derive from reflection of my role as designated IANA reviewer
for URI-scheme and message header field name registries, administered under
guidance of [RFC7595] and [RFC3864] respectively.
Both the IANA URI scheme registry [1] and the message header registry [2] have
allowance for *provisional* and *permanent* registrations, with the intent that
provisional registrations are permitted with low overhead so that useful
information about work in progress is easily made available at a well-known
location, and permanent registrations are subject to a degree of review and
practice that developers should feel comfortable to use them in their
implementation of Internet-facing applications.
There have been a small number of cases in which an ISE RFC publication has
requested a permanent registration (where the small number here is 2 or 3).
In at least one case, I felt that the lack of IETF review and/or widespread
implementation meant that permanent registration was not appropriate, but the
specifics of the guiding RFC did not make this an obviously correct decision,
and I felt I needed to request wider support for my view.
In at least one other case, despite the lack of formal review, I felt the
process followed, discussion that had taken place and apparent scope of
implementation meant that request for permanent registration was appropriate,
but again I felt the need to solicit support for this view.
My general concern here is that the status of IANA actions in ISE stream
publications is sometimes unclear, and use of the ISE track for RFC publication
might be used as an end run-around the expected review process that is commonly
associated with some registrations. In hindsight, [RFC3864] (section 2.1)
should explicitly indicate IETF-stream informational RFC publication, but at the
time this was written, IIRC, independent publications were still usually
last-called in the IETF.
You might reasonably say that the purpose of expert review is to deal with edge
cases like the ones I mention, and I'm OK with that. But I'm also aware that it
is important for decisions and processes to be as transparent as possible: if
review decisions can appear to be arbitrary or unexpected then registrations may
be discouraged and the purpose of the registries undermined.
Thanks.
#g
--
[1] http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xhtml
[2] http://www.iana.org/assignments/message-headers/message-headers.xhtml
[RFC7595] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7595
[RFC3864] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3864