Network Working Group J. Klensin Internet-Draft December 18, 2006 Expires: June 21, 2007 A Process Experiment in Normative Reference Handling draft-klensin-norm-ref-02.txt Status of this Memo By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on June 21, 2007. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2006). Abstract The IETF and RFC Editor have a long-standing rule that a document at a given maturity level cannot be published until all documents it references as normative are at that maturity level or higher. This rule has sometimes resulted in very long publication delays for documents and some claims that it was a major obstruction to advancing documents in maturity level. The IETF agreed to a way to bypass this rule with RFC 3967. This document proposes a one-year process experiment in which the "hold on normative reference" rule will be replaced by a "note downward normative reference and move on" Klensin Expires June 21, 2007 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Normative References December 2006 approach. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Proposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3.1. Source Documents Not Yet Processed by the IESG . . . . . . 4 3.2. Documents Already in RFC Editor Queue . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4. Target Documents that Can Be Referenced This Way . . . . . . . 4 5. Target documents not on the standards track . . . . . . . . . . 5 6. Discussion of Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 9. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 10. Changes for version -02 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 11. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . . . 8 Klensin Expires June 21, 2007 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Normative References December 2006 1. Introduction The IETF and RFC Editor have a long-standing rule (see, e.g., RFC 2026, Section 4.2.4 [RFC2026] and the extended discussion in RFC 3967 [RFC3967]) that a document at a given maturity level cannot be published until all documents it references as normative are at that maturity level or higher. This rule has sometimes resulted in very long publication delays for documents and some claims that it was a major obstruction to advancing documents in maturity level. Recognizing the problems that rule sometimes caused, RFC 3967 established an exception procedure for normative downward references under some specific circumstances. Perhaps because of its fairly stringent requirements, RFC 3967 has not proven adequate either to clear the backlog of documents awaiting upgraded documents or to prevent additional documents from joining that queue. This document assumes that downward references are possible only to standards-track documents (including BCPs) that are already published. While downward references to, e.g., Internet Drafts, are theoretically possible, they are not contemplated here. This document proposes a one-year process experiment in which the "hold on normative reference" rule will be replaced by a "note downward normative reference and move on" approach. 2. Terminology A reference involves two documents, the one in which the reference is embedded and the document referenced. Where needed for clarity, these documents are referred to as the "source document" and "target document" respectively. The term "standards track document", as used in this specification, is assumed to include BCPs but not Informational or Experimental documents of any variety or origin. 3. Proposal This document specifies a one-year RFC 3933 [RFC3933] process experiment (see the next section) that creates an alternative to holding source documents until all target documents referenced normatively are upgraded or by applying the procedure of RFC 3967. Klensin Expires June 21, 2007 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Normative References December 2006 3.1. Source Documents Not Yet Processed by the IESG An author or editor who requires a normative downward reference uses the following very simple procedure: o The reference text (i.e., in the "Normative References" section of the source document) is written as usual. o A note is included in the reference text that indicates that the reference is to a target document of a lower maturity level, that some caution should be used since it may be less stable than the document from which it is being referenced, and, optionally, explaining why the downward reference is appropriate. The IESG may, at its discretion, specify the exact text to be used. These annotations are part of the source document. If members of the community consider either the downward reference or the annotation text to be inappropriate, those issues can be raised at any time in the document life cycle, just as with any other text in the document. There is no separate review on these references. At the option of the author, similar notes may be attached to non- normative references. 3.2. Documents Already in RFC Editor Queue The IESG may, at its discretion, specify a procedure to be applied to source documents that are already in the RFC Editor queue, awaiting target referenced documents. That procedure might involve asking the RFC Editor to apply an appropriate annotation to all such documents, or to a selective list of documents. It might alternately involve the application of some additional review process to those documents, such as by directorates or other AD-appointed review committees, working group chairs, or appointed experts, each subject to appeal. That list of options is not intended to limit what the IESG might specify, but to give some indication of possibilities. While nothing in this document would prevent the IESG from concluding that each document now on hold for normative references to published target documents at a lower maturity level should be put through an additional Last Call to eliminate the restriction, that decision would definitely not be in the spirit of the experiment proposed here. 4. Target Documents that Can Be Referenced This Way The "downward reference by annotation" model specified here is applicable only to published standards track RFCs at lower maturity Klensin Expires June 21, 2007 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Normative References December 2006 levels. If references are needed to informational document, the procedures specified in RFC 3967 MUST be used for downward references (see Section 5). Obviously such downward references are part of the relevant source document at IETF Last Call and subject to comments from the community. Advancing documents, when appropriate, is still considered preferable to the use of either this procedure or the one specified in RFC 3967. This specification does not impose a specific test or requirement to determine appropriateness, partially because it would be impossible to do so for the general case, but the intention is to permit the IESG and the community to balance the importance of getting a source document published against the time and difficulty associated with upgrading a target document. That requirement is intended to be less stringent than the one of RFC 3967. 5. Target documents not on the standards track For consistency, in the case of a normative reference to a document not on the standards track that is approved under the procedures defined in RFC 3967, the annotation described in Section 3.1, or the retrospective annotation described in Section 3.2, SHOULD be added to the reference unless the IESG, after consideration of Last Call input, concludes it is inappropriate. 6. Discussion of Experiment Several claims have been made about problems that are being caused by the "no downward references" rule. The number of documents waiting for lower-maturity documents in the RFC Editor queue is objective and easily-measured. But claims about how many documents would be completed and processed to higher maturity levels if the normative reference rule were eliminated are impossible to validate without this type of experiment. Consequently, this experiment should serve three purposes: 1. Prevent any new documents from entering the "hold for normative reference" queue for standards-track documents already published (see Section 4) unless there is an explicit decision made that doing so is desirable. 2. At the option of the IESG, and under rules it adopts, clear the RFC Editor's current "hold for normative reference" queue of documents that reference appropriate target document already published or approved. Klensin Expires June 21, 2007 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Normative References December 2006 3. Permit the community to examine questions of how much effective elimination of the normative reference rule increases document throughput and the number of documents being advanced. Should the community conclude that the experiment had undesirable impacts, i.e., that a more traditional view of downward references was appropriate, we will have some set of documents that will have been approved and published under these rules. It might then be appropriate to note in the various indexes that those documents contained dependencies that would not generally be acceptable, at least until those dependencies were resolved. At the end of the year, if the IESG judges that the experiment has been a success, the procedure may be used for a further six months to allow time for the drafting of a suitable BCP. 7. Security Considerations This document specifies an IETF procedure. It is not believed to raise any security issues although, in principle, relaxing the normative downward reference rules for references associated with security mechanisms could make a specification less stable and hence less secure. 8. IANA Considerations This document requires no actions by the IANA. 9. Acknowledgments This proposal was suggested by a comment by Spencer Dawkins and many complaints about the negative impact of the current rules. The author is unsure about the validity of some of those complaints; the proposal is, in part, a way to test the validity question. Spencer also provided helpful comments on a preliminary draft. It was revised in response to extensive discussion in the IESG and benefited significantly by comments by Brian Carpenter. 10. Changes for version -02 [[anchor8: RFC Editor, please remove this section.]] The proposal has been significantly trimmed based on discussion with the IESG during and after Last Call. In particular, the provisions Klensin Expires June 21, 2007 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Normative References December 2006 for downward references to approved, but unpublished, Internet-Drafts and for references to Informational documents have been removed. The revised procedure applies only to published standards-track documents at a lower maturity level. Because of these changes, a section has been added that updates RFC 3967 to add annotations parallel to those specified here if that procedure is used. Some editorial corrections have also been made to improve clarity. 11. Normative References [RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, October 1996. [RFC3933] Klensin, J. and S. Dawkins, "A Model for IETF Process Experiments", BCP 93, RFC 3933, November 2004. [RFC3967] Bush, R. and T. Narten, "Clarifying when Standards Track Documents may Refer Normatively to Documents at a Lower Level", BCP 97, RFC 3967, December 2004. Author's Address John C Klensin 1770 Massachusetts Ave, #322 Cambridge, MA 02140 USA Phone: +1 617 491 5735 Email: john-ietf@jck.com Klensin Expires June 21, 2007 [Page 7] Internet-Draft Normative References December 2006 Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2006). 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