Re: [rfc-i] Lamenting clusters...

On 19. May 2022, at 01:47, Donald Eastlake <d3e3e3@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I think Informative references are normally to drafts and do not cause a hold up until the draft is published as an RFC.

That is the theory.

The practice appears to be that the RFC editor tries to achieve a “clean” state for RFCs that are published simultaneously, so even informative references point to the RFC version of a document.
That is of course a good thing when it can be achieved without too much collateral damage; it is definitely less confusing to have all the specs that make up one cluster reference each other by the RFC number.
But it creates informal dependencies that are hard to sleuth out from the outside.
It would be quite useful to be able to look at a cluster and see where the delay actually is.

What’s not so transparent is the definition of “simultaneous”.

What I would like to see is a form of “conditional reference” in the approved document:  An instruction for the RFC-editor to put in an informative reference if it does not cause a significant delay (either because it can stay a reference to the draft or because the simultaneous publishing actually is reasonably simultaneous without causing grave delays).

Grüße, Carsten

(My mental image of the RFC clustering process is that of the video game “Katamari Damacy” [1].
Sorry if that is only useful for those who have played that game...)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy

> 
> Thanks,
> Donald
> ===============================
>  Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
>  2386 Panoramic Circle, Apopka, FL 32703 USA
>  d3e3e3@gmail.com
> 
> 
> On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 4:53 PM Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@sandelman.ca> wrote:
> 
> Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org> wrote:
>     > “Teaches me not even to have an informative reference to a spec that
>     > informatively references another spec that normatively references a
>     > not-yet-published spec.”
> 
> Does doing this result in being in cluster with that spec?
> 
> 
> --
> Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@sandelman.ca>, Sandelman Software Works
>  -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-
> 
> 
> 
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