Subject: [Rfced-future] New issue 79: Style guide handling

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2021 23:08:24 +0200

Several people have mentioned the style guide, and so I went back and 
looked at both it and the text we have in the draft.

Right now the text in Section 6.1 states:

    This document creates the Editorial Stream.

    Any and all future documents produced by the RSWG and approved by the
    RSAB shall be published in the Editorial Stream.

The style guide consists of RFCs and other documents[1]. The text in the 
draft doesn't quite cover that. The RFCs in question are RFC 7322, 
RFC7997, and RFC 7841 (boiler plate). They are currently in the IAB 
stream. We should probably explicitly decide to redirect some or all of 
these to the Editorial Stream. With regard to the things that are *not* 
RFCs (abbreviations list, terms, and a few other things), the model we 
have seems to indicate that these documents would go to the RPC unless 
and until the RSWG and RSAB say otherwise in a new policy RFC.

Is my understanding correct or is there some proposal that someone else 
wants to make to address this?  If people want we can go document by 
document in our f2f, but it's important to have a good handle on the model.

Eliot

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/styleguide/

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2021 11:43:19 +1200

> the model we have seems to indicate that these documents would go to the RPC unless and until the RSWG and RSAB say otherwise

That seems exactly right. I'm not even sure we need to say anything in the draft; the parts of the style guide that are not in an RFC seem to be operational details that the RPC will handle as a matter of course.

Regards
   Brian

On 13-Aug-21 09:08, Eliot Lear wrote:
> Several people have mentioned the style guide, and so I went back and looked at both it and the text we have in the draft.
> 
> The style guide consists of RFCs and other documents[1]. The text in the draft doesn't quite cover that. The RFCs in question are RFC 7322, RFC7997, and RFC 7841 (boiler plate). They are currently in the IAB stream. We should probably explicitly decide to redirect some or all of these to the Editorial Stream. With regard to the things that are *not* RFCs (abbreviations list, terms, and a few other things), the model we have seems to 
indicate that these documents would go to the RPC unless and until the RSWG and RSAB say otherwise in a new policy RFC.

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2021 10:57:57 +0200

Hi Martin,

On 13.08.21 02:55, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>
> By "new policy RFC", I hope this would NOT mean that a policy RFC 
> would have to be written first, and then an actual RFC for the 
> content. I hope it wouldn't even really mean that the RFC being 
> written would have to explicitly declare policy.

I go back to the question I like to ask: do we need to say anything now, 
or can we leave the matter in the hands of the RSWG/RSAB?  I always ask 
that question not so much to kick a can down the road but because we 
could try to cover a great many eventualities that might never occur, 
and our svelte 20 page document could easily balloon.

This having been said, the term "policy RFC" probably should just read 
"RFC".  To Brian's point, perhaps the only thing this group should 
consider is which RFCs should be considered part of the new stream.

Eliot

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From: Peter Saint-Andre <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2021 10:16:38 -0600

[ no hats ]

On 8/12/21 3:08 PM, Eliot Lear wrote:
> these to the Editorial Stream. 

It's not clear to me that this document needs to specify the stream in
which the style guide RFCs will be handled. The current text says only
that documents produced by the RSWG will be published in the Editorial
Stream. If the style guide documents are taken up within the RSWG, then
they would be published in the Editorial Stream, but that's a matter for
the RSWG to address once it has been formed. That seems to me like a
reasonable path, but I'm not sure we need to make it explicit at this
time. But if folks want to include that level of detail for the
avoidance of doubt then as document editor I have no objections to
including it.

> With regard to the things that are *not*

Agreed. Do people think we need to say that here?

Peter

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2021 08:47:57 +1200

Well, Eliot wrote:

>>> perhaps the only thing this group should 

The challenge there is that we could spend a lot of time polishing
such text, but I fear we'd end up with "I know it when I see it",
as Justice Potter Stewart wrote in 1964.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it]

> Agreed. Do people think we need to say that here?

In the end I think we are better off not saying anything.

    Brian

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From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2021 11:15:09 +0300

Hi,

On 2021-8-13, at 0:08, Eliot Lear <[email-masked]> wrote:
> The style guide consists of RFCs and other documents[1]. The text in the draft doesn't quite cover that. The RFCs in question are RFC 7322, RFC7997, and RFC 7841 (boiler plate). They are currently in the IAB stream. We should probably explicitly decide to redirect some or all of these to the Editorial Stream. With regard to the things that are not RFCs (abbreviations list, terms, and a few other things), the model we have seems to indicate that these documents would go to the RPC unless and until the RSWG and RSAB say otherwise in a new policy RFC.

also with regards to things that are not RFCs, there is the "Guidelines to Authors of Internet-Drafts", which are currently being revised at https://github.com/ietf/id-guidelines, and which are technically owned by the IESG.

There is of course some overlap between the various parts that make up the "RFC style guide" and the "I-D guidelines", and it would IMO be a service to authors if the two didn't diverge and ideally were practically identical (apart from minor RFC specifics).

Thanks,
Lars