Re: Should the RFC Editor publish an RFC in less than 2 months?

[Lixia Zhang <lixia at CS.UCLA.EDU>]

On Dec 2, 2007, at 9:49 AM, Frank Ellermann wrote:

> John C Klensin wrote:
>
> > Of course, YMMD and, in particular, you might consider this
> > potential problem to be important enough to have other criteria.
>
> The "enhanced NOOP" discussion on the SMTP list just reminded me
> that we're talking about protecting IANA, RFC editor, and Trust
> from legal enforcement.
>
>  Frank

I'm late getting into this discussion, but also have the advantages  
of seeing arguments on all side at once :-)

it seems to me that the final decision on this issue would be a  
tradeoff in a multi-dimension space:
- how much gain vendors/users may get from publishing an RFC at time=T
  vs at (T + 2 months)
  in particular if the publication is tagged with some provisional  
clause.
- how strong is the desire of wanting the published RFCs to be stable
  (i.e. minimizing the chances of reclassification, with an  
understanding
   that we cannot completely eliminate the chance)
- As pointed out above, what may be the legal complication, if there  
is any,
  in handling appeals against a published RFC, and remedy the situation
  when an appeal succeeds.

I too first thought that the process ought to be optimized for the  
majority cases.  I now realized that the optimization should be based  
on the weighted percentages:

   (% of no-appeal cases) X (gains from publishing 2-month earlier)

versus

   (% of appeal cases) X (chance of an appeal succeeded)
                       X (cost from any potential legal complications
                          and remedy)
The remedy here may also include the cost to those people who acted  
on a published RFC in its first 2 months.

so the question to me is really: can we quantify the values of those  
weight factors?
(as an academic I dont have a lot clue here)

Lixia

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