Formal request for explanation of IANA delay

[Doug Ewell]

Luc Pardon <lucp at skopos dot be> wrote:

>   On 28-09-05 at 23:53, almost six months ago, under the then current
> RFC3066, the language tag reviewer, Michael Everson, sent a message to
> iana at isi.edu, titled "I approve the registration of el-Latn (Greek in
> Latin script)". The body of the message contained the registration as
> resquested by me.
>
>   It seems this message was never acted upon by IANA, although
> everybody on this list seems to agree that RFC3066 was still active
> back then.
>
>   Unless I am mistaken, all IANA had to do is cut and paste this
> request into 2 (two) HTML pages that form the registry.
>
>   About 2006-01-04 the RFC3066 registry was closed without el-Latn
> being included.
>
>   I would appreciate an explanation for the 3+ month inactivity.

Luc is right.  This is exactly the sort of thing that worries me.

>   Related question: Both 3066 and whatever-will-some-day-succeed-3066
> stipulate the review process in more or less elaborate detail, but
> stop short when the reviewer thows the request over the fence. Is
> there a document that describes the process thereafter, the delays
> that are to be expected, the complaints procedure if the delays are
> not respected? If not, why not?

An RFC can specify what IANA is supposed to do, give them their marching 
orders, but I don't think there's any recourse in case they don't follow 
them, or if they impose a significant delay.  In our case, the Reviewer 
could be replaced if he failed to do his job, but what could we do if 
IANA didn't update the registry?  Find someone else to host the "IANA 
Language Subtag Registry"?  We're kind of stuck.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/