Subject: [Ltru] Archival of registration forms

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:16:15 +0200

[Copied to ietf-languages because it is related to the registration
process.]

RFC 4646 says in "3.5.  Registration Procedure for Subtags":

>   All approved registration forms are available online in the
>   directory http://www.iana.org/numbers.html under "languages".

[And this is also in draft-ietf-ltru-4646bis-04]

At the specified address, you can find the language subtag registry
but not the actual registration forms. Do I read the RFC the wrong
way? Is it IANA's fault?

This is a problem because, now that we've registered several variants,
people who want to know more about them have nowhere to find out. When
you want to know more about a language, you can go to the Ethnologue
or to the ISO standard but, for variants, nothing is written down but
the registration form.

The registry entry is not sufficient since "the registry is not an
encyclopedia". References are omitted, for instance.

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:47:47 +0200

On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 04:16:15PM +0200,
 Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 27 lines which said:

> but not the actual registration forms. 

This is specially annoying since, apparently, the "official"
registration form, the one which was sent to the IANA, does not seem
to be always publically available. For instance, the form for the
variant "baku1926" did not appear in ietf-languages (to find out what
it looked like, you have to read several messages and to integrate the
various patches proposed and accepted).

---

From: Addison Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:02:19 +0100

RFC 4646 was written to mirror RFC 3066 (and before), with separate 
storage of the forms. The forms could be aggregated into a single file, 
etc. I don't know why IANA isn't archiving the forms currently.

I too find it questionable when the final registered format is not sent 
to the list prior to forwarding (or at least as part of forwarding) to 
IANA. In fact, I suspect that, given the stability guarantees and rules 
in RFC 4646, such registrations can be appealed if they differ from the 
requested record.

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

---

From: David Conrad <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:09:56 -0700

Hi,

I'm looking into this.  The reference in 4646 is almost certainly  
wrong as that URL points to the list of the registries IANA maintains  
and does not generally contain references to forms.

I'll let folks here know as I find out more.

Rgds,
-drc

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:38:15 +0200

On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 08:09:56AM -0700,
 David Conrad <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 41 lines which said:

> The reference in 4646 is almost certainly wrong as that URL points
> to the list of the registries IANA maintains and does not generally
> contain references to forms.

Do note that the IANA considerations of RFC 4646 mandates IANA to:

   Future work on the Language Subtag Registry SHALL be limited to
   inserting or replacing whole records preformatted for IANA by the
   Language Subtag Reviewer as described in Section 3.3 of this document
   and archiving the forwarded registration form.
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

But "archiving" perhaps does not imply "making publically
available". Do you think it should be more precise in 4646bis? If so,
I can suggest a wording.

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 03:54:39 -0400

> available". Do you think it should be more precise in 4646bis? If so,

I think greater precision is obviously needed; also, IANA needs to
take corrective action.

Doug, has IANA actually been *getting* the whole form, or do they
just get the new or changed record?

-- 
John Cowan  http://ccil.org/~cowan    [email-masked]
There are books that are at once excellent and boring.  Those that at
once leap to the mind are Thoreau's Walden, Emerson's Essays, George
Eliot's Adam Bede, and Landor's Dialogues.  --Somerset Maugham