Re: [Iasa20] WGLC: RFC 7776-bis (oops)

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Monday, April 1, 2019 08:48 -0400 Brian Haberman
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>...
> I would support having 7437bis take on the responsibility of
> fixing the text that 7776bis is currently trying to fix in
> 7437. It is silly to have an active -bis document updating
> another active -bis document. The gyrations needed to follow
> that logic will make it extremely difficult for any new reader
> of those documents to follow along.

With the understanding that, because of what was done with
draft-ietf-iasa2-consolidated-upd-, I am in a slightly
conflicted position about this, I suggest that this is not as
complicated as it seems.   If 7776bis contains a normative
reference to 7437bis (or vice versa) both go into the RFC Editor
queue as a cluster.  As long as the final results are consistent
and the documents are published at the same time, the gyrations
you are concerned about become largely non-existent, especially
if someone (like the IESG) informally suggests to the RFC Editor
that the -bis document that updates the other get the higher
number in the series.  Interrelated documents that address parts
of the same topic, especially when they change or replace other
documents on the topic, are one of the two reasons that
normative reference holds were introduced (the other is to avoid
normative references to I-Ds, but that has the same effect).  We
create extra gyrations for future readers only if the documents
don't get the references right.

That does not make the situation non-silly, but we should not
exaggerate the impact.   The potential for silliness and
excessive complexity for future readers is also the reason I
suggested trying to minimize the total number of documents from
the WG as much as possible.  I'm not sure we've gotten the
balance right, but it is probably much too late to reconsider
the current document profile.

    john