Subject: Re: draft-housley-iesg-rfc3932bis and the optional/mandatory nature of IESG notes
From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
To: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Cc: Olaf Kolkman <[email-masked]>, "Polk, William T." <[email-masked]>, IETF Discussion <[email-masked]>, IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:54:14 +0700
List-Id: IETF-Discussion <ietf.ietf.org>

Date:        Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:17:50 -0400
    From:        Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | Right; I think I made it fairly clear in my reply to John Klensin that
  | I disagreed fairly strongly with that and argued why I believed that
  | the IETF needs a special role to attach a note to something.  No
  | discussion prior or since has changed my mind.

Ask yourself if you'd have the same opinion if the IETF was publishing
its output in IEEE Transactions on Networking (or any similar publication),
or even something like the NY Times.

Would you still expect the IESG to be able to tell the editor of that
publication what they are required to do?

Then note that this is exactly the same ralationship that the RFC
editor should have with the IETF.

In any case, if the editor is failing to perform adequately, the correct
response is to replace the editor - there is no rational consittuency here
in which to seek consensus (no matter who does the seeking) and no-one
rational to handle appeals, so I'm not in favour of John K's compromise
proposal.

Simply allow the editor the discretion to make his/her own decisions
(in this case, it will become the ISE with co-ordination from the RFC editor)
and then if they're failing (which mostly means, not getting things published, 
but might also mean sub-standad publications), then replace them with
someone who can do better.

Nothing more than that is needed.

kre