Re: The IETF, Standards process, and the impact on the RFC series document production

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 05-Oct-19 05:11, Michael StJohns wrote:
...
> On 10/4/2019 3:51 AM, Christian Huitema wrote:
...
>> Implementing our standards involves a treasure hunt
>> to find how many RFC have to be read before understanding the whole
>> picture.
> This is problematic, but inherent, not so much in the RFC series, but in 
> the way we've chosen to do our standards process. 

Bingo! Changing the RFC series *will not* fix this problem.

My favourite example of this problem is the standards process itself.
This is exactly why I originated what is now at:
https://www.ietf.org/standards/process/informal/
Read it and have a good laugh. We shouldn't underestimate the size
and complexity of the problem.

Beating an old drum (and also indirectly replying to Nico Williams),
people really do need to read the earlier work on this topic:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-newtrk-repurposing-isd
Whatever the reasons why that document did not progress, it is
very clearly about the standards process, not the RFC series.

I've just looked back at some of my notes from 2005/2006, and what
I see is that vast amounts of IESG time (and worry) then went on things
that today are largely automated by the tracker. The same is probably
true for WG Chairs. In that context,
  "This document proposes that a new document series be created, called
   Internet Standards Documents ("ISD"s) and that these be real
   documents, separate from the underlying RFCs."
seemed pretty scary to a lot of people. So we got:
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/newtrk/j8Si3b0cqnQSX5a5Ee8NIVdyZg4
Maybe today we are better positioned to make progress.

   Brian