Re: New Version Notification for draft-resnick-variance-00.txt

[Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>]

> The problem I have is with not publishing as an RFC.   I don't think
> people should have to dig through email archives (which are not as
> reliably archived as the RFC series)  to find out what the whole IETF
> process is, or even the evolution history of the IETF process.   I think
> even brief deviations from the process should be archived the same as
> any other changes to the process.

There's not a lot of "digging through" when we're posting it to
ietf-announce (fairly low-volume, and where things such as NomCom
announcements and other appointments, RFP decisions, and other Very
Important IETF-related decisions are posted).  I think, personally,
that the kinds of exceptions we're talking about here are pretty much
equally important to, say, the announcement of the NomCom chair, the
NomCom's decisions about whom to appoint to the IESG and IAB and LLC
Board, the IAB's appointment of ISOC BoT directors, and the like.  The
ietf-announce list is, in fact, where we archive all of that stuff.
None of it goes into RFCs.

> But I'll flip this on its head: why did we suddenly become so concerned
> about the overhead of publishing a single RFC, when as far as I can tell
> we've had a pretty low bar for RFC publication all along?

Because (1) there is significant overhead, and publishing them does
get in the way of publishing other RFCs (including clearing out
Cluster 238), and (2) the RFCs are an archival document series, which
we would LIKE to keep to things of actual, long-term importance.
Historical information is (and should be) available elsewhere.

Barry