Re: Another document series?

--On tirsdag, november 30, 2004 12:13:41 -0500 Michael StJohns 
<mstjohns@mindspring.com> wrote:

> Folks -
>
> I've recently been asked to review a number of works in progress related
> to restructuring and other similar things.  Those documents were
> liberally splattered with references to various IDs
> (http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-newtrk-cruft-00.txt,
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-newtrk-repurposing-isd-00.
> txt, http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-wasserman-iasa-bcp-01.txt
> etc).  Its unclear that either the work in progress or the cited drafts
> will ever be published as RFCs.

The answer is yes-if-successful, yes-if-consensus, yes-with-namechange for 
those three particular documents. Not much different from the I-Ds of any 
given working group.

> Its also unclear that this
> (restructuring etc) will be resolved within the 6 month lifetime of any
> given ID.  Its also unclear that we can afford to either have these
> expire, or continually resubmit them.  And finally, we NEED to have this
> set of documents as permanent archivable documents to maintain the
> historical record.

Query: What purpose do you see the historical record as having?
I'm serious - "visibility to serious historians", "historical sunshine law" 
and "armoury for lawyers in court cases" are very different things to 
design for.

> It seems to me that neither ID status nor RFC status are appropriate for
> these documents.  The ID series is, by design, ephemeral and generally
> not citeable.  The RFC series is stable and citeable, but the lead time
> for introducing an RFC is somewhat north of 30 days or more.

Optimist.... the current queue time (approval to publication) is closer to 
4 months for IETF standards track. The effort at speeding up the IESG 
approval process has had ripple effects :-(
(that's why the RFC Editor's 2006 budget shows a hefty increase, btw...)

> I hate to open Pandora's box, but what I think we need is a citable,
> stable document series that has a production lead time similar to that of
> the IDs.  I would probably limit this to the non-technical administrivia
> we've been recently inundated with.

Unfortunately, almost the same arguments can be made for anything that has 
received serious attention in the I-D series. See the NEWTRK discussion 
about "working group snapshot".

                    Harald

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