Subject: RE: [newtrk] Quality? What quality?

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:09:26 -0700

> RFC 3774 claims that there is a perception that the quality 
> bar for IETF standards has been raised.  I find that 
> incredible; here's a quick, back-of-the-envelope, unscientific check:

The perception that the quality bar has been raised is not incompatible
with a higher rate of errata.

The number of errata produced is a function of many factors, not least
the number of active developers, the age of the document, the existence
of an errata process and the publicity given to it. It is also a
function of expectations, early RFCs are research notes, later RFCs are
defacto standards.

I would not expect many people to be sending in errata to RFCs 1-500,
then or now. Many later RFCs consist of nothing but errata for earlier
ones.

This is the first time I was made aware that *any* tool existed for
tracking errata. I certainly have not encountered any mention of it on
the IETF Web site. If a tool existed I would expect to see mention of it
in the text of every RFC.

Russ Housely asked me to respond to some open issues a couple of weeks
ago in an issues tracker that I have never been told about or
encountered earlier either. 

This stuff is not rocket science, if a collaboration tool is going to
provide any value it has to be conspicuously advertised. Expecting
people to find out about them is not going to be effective in the least.

> Weakening procedures designed to ensure quality (multiple 
> stages of review, specific requirements for advancement, 
> etc.) would seem to be counterproductive if the objective of 
> high-quality standards is to be maintained.

If you want high quality standards then you need a lot more than
process.

I don't see many IESG comments that I regard as being concerned with
document or protocol quality, most of the ones I have seen are concerned
with consistency or choice of engineering approach. 

> Below is a specific example (with all due respect to the RFC 
> authors, the IESG, and the RFC Editor) that shows that the 
> quality bar certainly hasn't been raised, and hasn't merely 
> been lowered; it appears to have been dropped:

The 'quality bar' is a euphemism for 'complies with the IESG vision of
the Internet', which is not at all the same thing.

.
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