Re: radical suggestion

[Russ Allbery <[e-mail]>]

Keith Moore <[e-mail]> writes:

> instead of revising the drums document, how about (at least initially)
> producing a separate document with amendments and advancing the pair of
> those documents to draft standard, with a clear indication that the
> draft standard consists of the first document as amended by the second?

It's really frustrating to try to code to an amended standard.  The W3C
does this from time to time, and I find it almost impossible to keep track
of what the *real* standard is without actually printing out the original
standard and then going through the amendments and noting them on the
printout by hand.

I wonder how many people completely ignore TC1 to C99 because it's
published as errata that essentially requires that you do this in order to
get any sense of what changed.

Publishing a standard document plus errata always struck me as a relic
from the days before electronic documents.  We have the ability to
incorporate errata directly into the original document and publish a
revised version, which is then just radically easier for everyone involved
to use and make sense of, so I think we should use it, even if it's a bit
more work in the preparation.

One can always limit the scope of the work to only considering specific
changes with the basic assumption that RFC 2822 will remain almost
entirely unchanged.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([e-mail])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>