Request for publication: New Version Notification for draft-faltstrom-5892bis-04

[John C Klensin]

--On Sunday, March 06, 2011 14:27 -0500 Eric Brunner-Williams
<ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net> wrote:

>> FWIW, I think that would be wise.  It might even be a good
>> idea to dedicate a few minutes to the Apps Area meeting to a
>> review of the issues with this document because the
>> principles --both about treatment of dissenting Contributors
>> and Unicode version compatibility-- might affect other groups
>> in the future.
> 
> If the scope of dissent is limited to the momentary wrangle
> over 03/10 heartburn that has some utility.
> 
> However, the scope of concern over design principles,
> assumptions about the cost of memory, of signaling within
> protocols, the existence and size of character repertoires,
> ... is a large ensemble of engineering choices, which has some
> other utility.

Sure.   The only issue I was referring to had to do with
acknowledgments, Contributor status, etc., and how they might
relate to someone whose ideas were used but either in a context
that he or she didn't approve of or didn't agree with the WG's
conclusion in some other way.   Situations like that are
problematic for a number of reasons but most especially because
the IETF's IRP policies require identification and acknowledge
of Contributions so the option that exists in many other places
of simply removing a name on request from, e.g., the
acknowledgments just doesn't exist.   I think that issue falls
pretty clearly into your first category and was what I thought
might be worth a quick review at the area meeting.

For the second set of issues, you know as well as anyone what
Jon Postel would have said.   For others, updated to today's
procedures and vocabulary, anyone who can write a careful and
reasoned dissent can hand it off to the Independent Submissions
Editor and request publication in the RFC series.  If it is
well-reasoned enough (and obviously focused on issues and design
choices, not personalities) that the explanation of the
alternate view would be helpful to the community, it would
probably be published.  But the proper response to an RFC one
doesn't like, especially an RFC that reflects rough consensus in
the IETF, is another RFC that explains the perceived problem,
not trying to get the fact of one's dissent documented without
an explanation.

    john