Re: [tao-discuss] Revising RFC6722? (was Re: Review Request for Possible Revision of the Tao of the IETF)

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

On 08-Apr-22 20:21, Lars Eggert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2022-4-7, at 23:50, Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> But I wasn't wrong. I think RFC6722 was very wrong not to require IETF
>> review of updates to the Tao, especially for a massive update like this
>> one. It's quite unreasonable to put that extra load on the IESG alone.
>> RFC6722 being informational, it isn't a rule, so I urge the IESG to
>> put this out for community review. That can only make it better.
> 
> if people think that RFC6722 should be revised, the other thing I find problematic about it is that Section 2 prescribes a certain detailed way in which proposed changes are supposed to be published, archived, etc. This might have made sense at publication time in 2012, but seems overly constraining now.

Yes, I agree. And (especially given the proposal to split the Tao into bite-sized pieces, which seems reasonable) we might want to generalize this to cover all the "general information" content on the web site. I don't at all think we should take the responsibility for the web site content away from the LLC + EMO + IESG, but just have a principle that non-trivial changes should be given some sort of community review.

> (I'll note that the current GitHub process for editing is more in line with one of the alternative approaches described in Section 3 than anything else.)
> 
> Given that RFC6722 is Informational, I'm not sure if it's worthwhile updating it. But someone who felt more strongly about it could prepare a bis document.
> 
> I think the main motivation behind RFC6722 was that Tao revisions were only very infrequently published, and a more lightweight process was desired. After ten years, we could certainly ask the question whether this process change was a success, and if not, what could be improved.

It wasn't a success in terms of having the Tao revised more often, and the result is that we now have a major revision that calls for a lot of effort to review. I'm not pointing any fingers, simply observing what happened.

Rgds
    Brian

> 
> Thanks,
> Lars
>