Info/exptl RFCs [Re: Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

At the risk of sounding defensive....

--On tirsdag, desember 10, 2002 09:06:41 -0500 John C Klensin 
<john-ietf@jck.com> wrote:

>
> 	(i) The IESG has taken it upon itself to do _editorial_
> 	reviews on these documents, sometimes sitting on them
> 	for weeks or months because some AD says "I have
> 	comments which I want to write up" and then getting
> 	comments that involve editorial nitpicking or simple
> 	disagreements with the author's presentation, rather
> 	than standards coordination.  It is hard to sympathize
> 	with IESG's delaying other work when IESG time is being
> 	spent this way.

I am trying to deal with the slowness (about 20 documents were 
seemingly"lost in the system"; I am kicking them as hard as I know how. 
Some of them apparently DO have real issues associated with them).

> 	(ii) The IESG has added looking for protocol and
> 	operational suggestions that would be damaging to the
> 	network, if deployed, to the "standards coordination"
> 	item.  I personally think this was reasonable, but it
> 	has added to the workload and been used as the excuse
> 	for long delays, consideration, and editorial review.
> 	In years past, we counted on the RFC Editor to catch and
> 	filter these sorts of things and assumed that really
> 	stupid and dangerous ideas were better dealt with by
> 	RFCs that refuted them rather than by disclaimers and
> 	arm-wrestling about their precise text as a condition
> 	for publication.

I think that's appropriate for the IESG to do.
The last ones I remember in this class were the Higgs "we should bless 
alternate DNS roots" documents.

http://www.ietf.org/IESG/Announcements/draft-higgs-root-defs.ann gives the 
details. This is 1 1/2 years ago - it's not something we do a lot.

> 	(iii) The IESG has established a de facto procedure
> 	(undocumented and with no real rules) for their
> 	reviewing and approving individual submission
> 	informational/experimental documents before those
> 	documents get near the RFC Editor.  They have then,
> 	apparently, told the RFC Editor that such documents take
> 	priority over anything submitted to the RFC Editor
> 	directly (at least the RFC Editor believes that to be
> 	the case).

I don't believe such a procedure exists.
What can confuse the issue is that we pass some documents as WG documents 
that are *named* as if they were individual submissons. And the documents 
produced by the IESG or the IAB *do* get priority, and *do* enter the 
process without RFC Editor review before I* approval.
But if there has been a case of a truly individual document being end-run 
around the RFC Editor review in the past year, I'd like to hear its name.

                  Harald