| Internet-Draft | IETF Doc Consensus | February 2020 |
| Halpern & Rescorla | Expires 24 August 2020 | [Page] |
This document proposes that the IETF never publish any IETF Stream RFCs without IETF rough consensus. This updates RFC 2026.¶
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IETF procedures, as defined by [RFC2026] 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 "RFC"s.¶
As a consequence, it was permitted for the IESG 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 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] 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 permit such information 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 [IESG-STATE-AD]. While this apparently improved the situation, looking closely it makes it worse. Rather than publishing documents without verifying that there is rough consensus, as the wording in [RFC2026] suggests, this has 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 can not agree on. However, we have an explicit procedure for such publication, namely the Independent Stream. Or, for research documents, the IRTF Stream, which explicitly publishes many minority opinion Informational RFCs.¶
If this proposal is not accepted, there is still a minor problem to be addressed. When a non-consensus document is published, the current boilerplate simply omits the sentence claiming that there is consensus. If the community feels that we need to keep the right for the IESG to publish Informational or Experimental RFCs without IETF rough consensus, then please, the IAB SHOULD use its authorithy over the boilerplate for RFCs to make the boilerplate explicit rather than relying on readers to detect a missing sentence.¶
Editors Note: The above paragraph and this note should be removed prior to publication as an RFC, as the paragraph will then be OBE.¶
No values are assigned in this document, no registries are created, and there is no action assigned to the IANA by this document.¶
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.¶