RFC SERIES OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE (RSOC) July 22, 2019 RSOC Meeting Reported by: Cindy Morgan, IETF Secretariat ATTENDEES --------------------------------- Sarah Banks (Chair) Heather Flanagan (RSE, non-voting) Tony Hansen Christian Huitema (IAB Lead) Cindy Morgan (Scribe, non-voting) Mark Nottingham Peter Saint-Andre Portia Wenze-Danley (IETF LLC Board Liaison, non-voting) REGRETS --------------------------------- Adam Roach MINUTES --------------------------------- 1. SLA exception process Heather Flanagan reported that the RPC will miss the SLA for Q3 2019, and will likely miss it for Q4 as well because of the new format rollout and Cluster 238. She requested that an SLA exception process be documented. Sarah Banks noted that the RPC has hired two additional heads, and is in the process of hiring two more. Christian Huitema said that RSOC knows at a high level why the SLA is being missed, but that he would like some kind of report about how these resources are bing used and how long the issues are expected to continue. The RSOC agreed on the following process: 1) The RSE will notify the IETF LLC that the SLA will be missed, and that an exception has been requested. 2) The IETF LLC will request a report from the RPC to explain why the SLA will be missed, and how resources are being used for things not currently counted towards the SLA. Mark Nottingham asked if there was a sense of how much the SLA would be missed by. Heather Flanagan replied that it was difficult to know because there are too many exceptional things happening at the same time between the new format testing/rollout and Cluster 238. Sarah Banks asked if it is still true that the RPC expects to miss the SLA for the rest of the year. Heather Flanagan replied that they do, in the same way that hitting Tier 2 of the SLA (1950 Pages Gone to EDIT) means that the following quarter will also be in Tier 2 because things have been pushed out. Tony Hansen asked if they would hit Tier 3; Heather replied that it was a possibility. Tony Hansen asked how clusters affect the page rate. Heather Flanagan replied that they make things slower because everything needs to be checked for consistency between all of the documents in the cluster. Clusters also generally mean that more people are involved in the AUTH48 process. The time required to edit documents in a cluster increases exponentially based on the number of documents in the cluster. One thing that has been difficult to capture in the SLA is RPC- controlled states; AUTH48 is not an RPC-controlled state, but the editors can spend much time there following up with authors. Sarah Banks noted that this would be easier if there was a limit to the number of authors who were allowed to be listed on an RFC. Heather Flanagan replied that a conversation about this topic is had in the IESG every year or so, but they have not been able to come to an agreement on this. 2. Format update Christian Huitema asked how confident RSOC should be about August as the date for the new format rollout. Heather Flanagan replied that there is still disagreement about the specs versus the tools for v3, and the discussion has been heated enough that she cannot just bring the parties involved together to sort it out. As a result, the Heather has been called upon to make a decision as RSE, but she would feel more comfortable if she had input from XML experts. Christian Huitema suggested a couple of names for Heather to reach out to. Heather Flanagan reported that the RPC still thinks that they will be able to roll out the new format by August, but without the -bis documents. Christian Huitema asked why the new format wasn't rolled out in stages. Heather Flanagan replied that that had initially been the plan with the IESG, but they later decided that they wanted it all at once. Since the IESG submits the bulk of the documents the RFC Editor receives, they have something of a gating function here. The IESG may not be ready to approve documents in the new format, even if the RPC is ready to receive them. Sarah Banks noted that the community should be aware that there will be several months of debugging and increased workload for the RPC during the implementation phase, and the SLA will likely be affected. Sarah Banks asked how far along the tools testing is. Heather Flanagan replied that the Datatracker now accepts v3 document. All of the editors are now taking v2 documents and converting them to v3 and asking authors to check the output XML, and iterating based on that regularly. She estimated that each editor is spending about 20% of their time working on testing the tools, and that time is not counted towards the SLA. Tony Hansen said that the SLA should be changed to take into account the time that the RPC spends on things like tools testing, but that he is not sure about the right way to do that. Sarah Banks agreed that this is something the RSOC should look at in the short term. Mark Nottingham asked if there was anything that described the delta between the original specs for v3 and the implementation. Heather Flanagan replied that there is a summary in draft-levkowetz-xml2rfc- v3-implementation-notes. Heather Flanagan reported that Martin Thomson is providing feedback on the current CSS for the HTML documents based on his experience using a well-received CSS in his WGs. 3. Open RSE items Heather Flanagan shared her list of open tasks: - i18n list - See is the Tao of the IETF can be updated to address some of the issues that arise during AUTH48 - Thoughts on the RFC Editor and RSE function - Follow up with Stream Managers re: the SLA Process - IEEE reference examples - Annual report on 2018-2019 goals of the RSE - Update active projects in the RSE wiki - Vedder bis document - Follow up on Alissa's comments re: Why archive - Send out satisfaction surveys - Create an RSE wiki page regarding long term maintenance for RFC output - Create an I-D regarding issues and debates on Streams and Statuses - Follow up on opencitations.net - Develop an outreach plan - Create a list of use cases to explore semantic versioning plus categorization - Draft the BibTeX citations format such that we can add it to the info pages - DOI FAQ - Draft a statement for all IAB, ISOC liaisons on referencing RFCs - Research on how to assign good keywords - Review rfc-editor-errata-process and decide whether to revive it and make it an RFC. 4. RSOC meetings now through the end of the year The RSOC agreed to continue choosing the meeting date and time each month via Doodle poll, rather than picking a set day and time. 5. Executive Session