Network Working Group J. Halpern, Ed. Internet-Draft Ericsson Updates: 2026 (if approved) E. Rescorla, Ed. Intended status: Best Current Practice Mozilla Expires: May 7, 2020 November 4, 2019 IETF Stream Documents Require IETF Rough Consensus draft-halpern-gendispatch-consensusinformational-00 Abstract This document proposes that the IETF never publish any IEtF stream RFCs without IETF rough consensus. This updates RFC 2026. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. 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." This Internet-Draft will expire on May 7, 2020. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2019 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Halpern & Rescorla Expires May 7, 2020 [Page 1] Internet-Draft IETF Doc Consensus November 2019 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3. Proposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 7. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1. Introduction 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 is currently permitted for the IETF to approve an Internet Draft for publication as an RFC without IETF rough consensus. 2. Terminology 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. 3. Proposal The IETF MUST NOT publish RFCs on the IETF stream without IETF rough consensus. 4. Discussion The current procedures permit such publication. The IESG has issued a statement saying that no document will be issued without first conducting an IETF Last Call. While this apparently improves 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. Halpern & Rescorla Expires May 7, 2020 [Page 2] Internet-Draft IETF Doc Consensus November 2019 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. 5. IANA Considerations No values are assigned in this document, no registries are created, and there is no action assigned to the IANA by this document. 6. Security Considerations 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. 7. Normative References [RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, DOI 10.17487/RFC2026, October 1996, . [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997, . [RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, May 2017, . Authors' Addresses Halpern & Rescorla Expires May 7, 2020 [Page 3] Internet-Draft IETF Doc Consensus November 2019 Joel M. Halpern (editor) Ericsson P. O. Box 6049 Leesburg, VA 20178 US EMail: joel.halpern@ericsson.com Eric K. Rescorla (editor) Mozilla 331 E. Evelyn Ave Mountain View, CA 94101 US EMail: ekr@rtfm.com Halpern & Rescorla Expires May 7, 2020 [Page 4]