IETF Stream Documents Require IETF Rough Consensus
Ericsson
P.O. Box 6049
Leesburg
VA
20178
United States of America
joel.halpern@ericsson.com
Mozilla
331 E. Evelyn Ave.
Mountain View
CA
94101
United States of America
ekr@rtfm.com
General
This document requires that the IETF never publish any IETF
Stream RFCs without IETF rough consensus. This updates RFC 2026.
IETF procedures, as defined by ,
allow for Informational or Experimental RFCs to be published
without IETF rough consensus. For context, it should be
remembered that this RFC predates the separation of the various
streams (e.g., IRTF, IAB, and Independent.) When it was written,
there were only "RFCs".
As a consequence, the IESG was permitted to
approve an Internet-Draft for publication as an RFC without IETF
rough consensus.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT",
"REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL
NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT",
"RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED",
"MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to
be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as
shown here.
The IETF MUST NOT publish RFCs on the IETF Stream without
establishing IETF rough consensus for publication.
The IETF procedures prior to publication of this BCP
permitted such informational or experimental publication without IETF
rough consensus. In 2007, the
IESG issued a statement saying that no document will be issued
without first conducting an IETF Last Call
. While this
apparently improved the situation, when looking more closely, it made it
worse.
Rather than publishing documents without verifying
that there is rough consensus, as the wording in
suggests, this had the IESG explicitly publishing documents on
the IETF Stream that have failed to achieve rough consensus.
One could argue that there is a need for publishing some
documents that the community cannot agree on. However, we have an
explicit path for such publication, namely the Independent
Stream. Or, for research documents, the IRTF Stream, which explicitly
publishes minority opinion Informational RFCs.
This document has no IANA actions.
This document introduces no new security considerations. It is a
process document about changes to the rules for certain corner
cases in publishing IETF Stream RFCs.
However, this procedure will prevent publication of IETF Stream
documents that have not reached rough consensus about their security
aspects, thus potentially improving security aspects of IETF Stream
documents.
Normative References
Informative References
Guidance on Area
Director Sponsoring of Documents
IESG
IESG Statement