Re: [Gendispatch] Updating the IETF Discussion List Charter (was: Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-eggert-bcp45bis-02.txt)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 6/26/22 11:53, Barry Leiba wrote:
>> Maybe
>> because I-Ds are too much work, maybe also because they look too much
>> like RFCs and have so many rules enforced on them these days.  I-Ds were
>> not originally intended to be that much work; we've layered on more and
>> more formal requirements and expectations over the years.
> This is an interesting point, because, no, I-Ds are not a lot of work
> and do not have rules enforced on them.
>
> The rules and the nit-checker that points many of them out are for
> when the I-D goes to the IESG, looking for approval to be published as
> an RFC.  But just to post an individual Internet draft?  Just knock up
> a text file in the approximate format, taking an existing one as an
> example, give it a name that begins "draft-moore-" and ends with
> "-00", and post it.  The rules at this stage are*very*  few.
>
> Maybe part of the problem is that that's not clear, that because of
> the rules that are applied at the latter stages we have fostered a
> skewed perception of what's required just to post an initial idea.  We
> should definitely fix that, if so.

Well, there's clearly some sort of disconnect here, because every I-D 
I've submitted for the past decade or more has required hours of 
fiddling with xml with arbitrary rules, and boilerplate with arcane 
rules, and responding to meaningless error messages, usually with a 
deadline looming, iterating until a miracle happens and the document is 
actually accepted.   I realize that it's not strictly necessary to write 
I-Ds using xml2rfc but I've been of the impression that the same rules 
are enforced either way.   So maybe this is a tools problem or a web 
site problem rather than a rules problem, but I think there's some sort 
of problem there.

Keith