Re: [yam] Referencing 1652bis and update to RFC 5321/5322

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

John,

Sure.  The difficulty lies at the intersection of "duty" with
"resources", "motivation", and "priorities".  Your observations
about small issues, errata, and improved understanding can be
applied to almost any standards-track RFC.  As an extreme
example, there are certainly enough small issues, updates, and
improved understanding to justify updates/replacements for RFC
768 and/or RFC 793 yet, "duty" aside, we have not done that.
  

Touchè! (Though I'll point out that we have one document in INTAREA that has an Updates: RFC 791 clause...)

For instance, I looked at
draft-ietf-yam-5321bis-smtp-pre-evaluation and all the
suggested changes make sense to me (irrespective of what
labels we might be using to name the resulting RFCs).
    

Sure.  They make sense to me too.  Whether they make enough
sense to justify the editorial effort, the efforts by the WG to
be sure that any changes are made correctly and don't have
side-effects, etc., is really the question, not whether the
document can be made better with another editing pass (in the
case of 5321bis, the third such pass if one counts from 2821 and
a somewhat higher number if one goes further back -- there is
still some unchanged 821 text in 5321).
  

Yes, indeed.

I note that the thesis of draft-housley-two-... can be
interpreted as "one revision after the original spec is
worthwhile, but more than one isn't worth the effort".  I don't
happen to believe that,

I do not believe it either, but that was NOT what the IESG was saying, or at least not in my opinion.

At least from my point of the message should be that RFCs should be revised and improved as often as is needed and where the effort is still worthwhile in a cost/benefit sense. Just that we don't think we need specific labels beyond two levels to distinguish different revision/acceptance levels.

and I'm keenly aware of the fact that
errata, even "approved" errata, do not constitute community
consensus documents, but,

I am with you on that.

if the IESG does, then YAM is pretty
worthless even though the documents themselves (again, like
almost all other documents the IETF has produced) could be
improved.
  

I do not believe the IESG is saying that everyone should be using errata from now on. There is certainly some frustration in the community and sometimes in some of my fellow ADs about the time it takes to produce an RFC, and that does sometimes lead people to not bother with doing it, relying on Internet drafts, errata, common sense, their own memories or their code base to reflect what the true protocol behaviour should be. I still think its better to publish RFCs. (And for the record, I do not believe it is that hard.)

Jari