Re: [xml2rfc] RFC Bibtex format doi numbering incorrect

[Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]>]

Hi John,

On 2017-05-30 00:26, John R Levine wrote:
>> Whatever was used, once you wrote the code, wouldn't it make sense to
>> publish where/how lookups should happen?  Has this been done?
> 
> Of course.  It's in RFC 7669.
> 
>> And no matter how opaque the DOI series identifiers are in general, there's
>> still nothing that prevents the RFC Editor from _having_ a defined mapping
>> from RFC numbers to DOI and vice versa, if a decision is made that this
>> would be helpful, right?
> 
> No.  I really, really, wish that people would stop trying to relitigate 
> this settled fact.  We had the exact same argument before the IAB 
> published RFC 7669 which says:

So you are saying that even if the RFC-Editor wished to define and publish
an algorithmic mapping between RFC numbers and DOI identifiers, they would
not be permitted to do so?


	Henrik

> 
>     DOIs are treated as opaque identifiers.  The DOI suffixes assigned to
>     RFCs are currently based on the "doc-id" field of the RFC index in
>     XML (rfc-index.xml), but the suffix of future RFCs might be based on
>     something else if circumstances change.  Hence, the reliable way to
>     find the DOI for an RFC is not to guess, but to look it up in the RFC
>     index or on the RFC Editor website <https://www.rfc-editor.org/>.
>     RFC references created from entries in the usual bibxml libraries
>     will have DOIs included automatically.
> 
> Among the reasons not to change it is that RFCs can contain references to 
> other kinds of documents, some of those other things also have DOIs, and 
> those DOIs always have to be looked up.  I hope we agree that code that 
> tried to guess some DOIs while looking up others would be fragile and 
> likely to break in obscure ways.
> 
> As far as I can tell all of the code around the IETF that handles DOIs 
> does it correctly except for Julian's, and by this time he could have 
> fixed it with less effort than he's spent arguing that he doesn't want to.
> 
> R's,
> John
>