Re: [Tools-discuss] emailing authors of an RFC

[Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]>]

Hi Sandy, all,

On 2019-06-13 19:20, Sandy Ginoza wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Adding Heather to the thread.  
> 
> I think this is a reasonable thing that could be added to the RFC
> info pages.  My main concern is the ongoing maintenance effort if the
> underlying addresses are supposed be kept current.  Henrik, if any of
> the underlying addresses become stale with the existing aliases, what
> happens?  Do you have a method for keeping them up to date?

The draft email aliases use the latest email information from each author's
datatracker account.  If the address used when submitting a draft has
been marked inactive, the current primary address for that author is used
instead.  If the account of an author has no active addresses (presumably
because the author has marked them all inactive) no email will go out to
that author.

The aim is to use the most current address for each author.  Of course,
if an author doesn't keep their set of email addresses current in the
datatracker, we're not better off (but also not worse off) than using the
original email address from the document.  Sometimes, though, an author
will ask the secretariat to update the address set of a co-author, which
helps for authors who don't have a login or don't maintain their set of
email addresses.

What I think we could easily do is to provide an API that provides a
JSON blob with the best set of author addresses for a given RFC, based
on the information in the datatracker accounts of the authors; you could
then use that to maintain rfc author aliases similar to the draft author
aliases provided at @ietf.org.

> Michael, just curious - what’s your use case for this?  Currently on
> the info pages, we have text suggesting the user email the WG if they
> want to discuss the RFC; for example, this is what appears for RFC
> 7030:

> Discuss this RFC: Send questions or comments to [e-mail]
> <mailto:[e-mail]?subject=Question%20regarding%20RFC%207030>
> 
> Thanks,
> Sandy
> 
>> On Jun 13, 2019, at 8:22 AM, Bob Hinden <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>> Henrik,
>> 
>>> On Jun 13, 2019, at 6:18 AM, Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 2019-06-13 08:39, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>>>> On Jun 12, 2019, at 22:14, Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Do we have author aliases for RFCs?  Maybe we don't.
>>>>> 
>>>>> No.  Not sure if we should.
>>>> 
>>>> Yes, we should.  (See the discussion over at 
>>>> Archived-At: ⁨<https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/anima/sfev_MdLg-cgZTVFxE8jl3SQCIo>⁩
>>>> for an example why this would be a good idea.)
>>> 
>>> Let me clarify.  I wasn't trying to say that RFC author aliases wouldn't be
>>> a good thing, I was questioning whether the IETF should provide these, rather
>>> than the RFC Editor.
>> 
>> I agree, this is a question for the RFC Editor.
>> 
>> Personally, I am not sure I see too much value, as maintaining an alias over many years will be difficult.  Especially for people who don’t contribute frequently.  But that is again a question for the RFC Editor.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Bob
>> 
>> 
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> 
>