Re: I-D Action: draft-roach-bis-documents-00.txt

["Martin Thomson" <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, May 9, 2019, at 02:30, Adam Roach wrote:
> I'm not married to the notion of an appendix, but I think the 
> description of changes benefits greatly from being in a dedicated 
> section 

Yep, it was a mere quibble.  I think that a dedicated section is a very good idea, but that the additional condition that it be hidden away is not always as good an idea.  With a small change, Section 1.4 might be better.

Take RFC 8446 as an example.  It's hardly a bis document, but it takes Sections 1.2 and 1.3, over almost two pages, for this purpose.  I don't want to invalidate that approach.  After all, we have a long-standing requirement to include some statement about what has changed in the abstract (which I assume you aren't changing).

I've no problem with a recommendation to use an appendix.  I think that those sections in TLS 1.3 are a bit of a distraction from the main event and might have been left until later in the document, but that (like much of this) is a point upon which reasonable people can disagree.

> I've had several conversations with standing and former members of the 
> IESG about the overall proposal I present in this document, and more 
> than one person got hung up on the notion of letting 
> known-to-be-deprecated approaches through without comment. Largely, 
> these involve issues that have already been documented in BCP  or 
> Standards Track documents, and which would otherwise constitute DISCUSS 
> criteria. Cast in that light, I think the enumeration of what would be 
> different in a green-field protocol is actually quite important, 
> although I concede that the current text might not capture it as clearly 
> as I like.

I think that a *strong* encouragement to perform the analysis (i.e., SHOULD) is better than an absolute mandate (MUST).  That gives the right incentive, but leaves groups that get wrapped around the axle of an old issue an option that they can exercise.

Final point, and it's a new one (sorry): Authorship.  This is likely to be a sensitive topic.  But it is probably not appropriate to replace the entire author list for a small change.  Some guidance on that would be welcome.  My suggestion would be to recognize new authors either as an additional author or editor, or even to list them in the contributors.  Like a lot of this, judgment will need to be exercised, but that should take into account the size of the change and the amount of work that was done.