Re: BCP97bis

[Warren Kumari <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 10:41 AM Murray S. Kucherawy <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 7:36 AM Salz, Rich <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>>
>>    - The IESG has had multiple cases during my time there where we
>>    haven't had access to some normative reference, and so we can't do our
>>    job.  This has added long delays to document processing.  That's what we're
>>    trying to address here.
>>
>>
>>
>> I believe it is far more common for the IESG to review and progress
>> documents without having all normative references tracked down and read.
>>
>
> The role doesn't matter, does it?  As an Area Review Team member or even a
> Working Group participant faced with a document with normative references
> behind a paywall, you face the same problem.
>

Yes. No. Maybe.

There are some protocols where the only people
implementing/interoperating/whatever are all part of a small group that
already knows and understands the <whatever is in the paywalled document>,
and / or are willing to shell out the money to pay for it.

A recent example of this is
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-6lo-nfc/ -- there are likely to
only be a very small number of people who will implement the tranport part,
and they already understand the "NFC Logical Link Control Protocol version
1.3" and / or would be willing to purchase it.

Yes, in an ideal world, this would be an open, free, etc document -- but,
absent an ideal world, I still think that it's better that how IPv6 is
transmitted over NFC using 6LoWPAN is documented in an RFC than having an
undocumented protocol....

W


>
> Sure, you could make some assumptions that what's in the normative
> reference is correct, or sane, or trustworthy, or whatever.  What if you're
> wrong?  What if you want to be certain?
>
> Shouldn't our processes err on the side of pushing for quality?
>
> -MSK
>


-- 
The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the
complexities of his own making.
  -- E. W. Dijkstra