RFC SERIES OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE (RSOC) July 20, 2020 RSOC Meeting Reported by: Cindy Morgan, IETF Secretariat ATTENDEES --------------------------------- Sarah Banks (RSOC Chair) Jay Daley (IETF LLC Board Liaison, non-voting) Tony Hansen John Levine, (Temporary RFC Series Project Manager, non-voting) Cindy Morgan (Scribe, non-voting) Mark Nottingham Adam Roach Peter Saint-Andre GUEST --------------------------------- Sandy Ginoza (RFC Production Center) REGRETS --------------------------------- Cullen Jennings (IAB Lead) RSOC DECISIONS: 2020 --------------------------------- - 2020-05-27: RSOC agrees that the RFC Series should plan to be able to regenerate the output formats of RFCs. Related action item: John Levine to draft a plan that defines when it is appropriate to regenerate the output formats of RFCs. - 2019 Decisions: ACTION ITEM REVIEW --------------------------------- Done: - 2020-06-22: John Levine to add the plan on how to manage change control for the v3 XML to draft-iab-rfc7991bis and as a README file for the GitHub repository for https://github.com/rfc-format/draft-iab-xml2rfc-v3-bis. - 2020-06-22: Jay Daley to draft a process for managing changes to the v3 RFC XML vocabulary. - 2020-05-27: Sarah Banks to talk to the RPC about running an unofficial "shadow SLA" in order to assess what the actual SLA should be under v3. In Progress: - 2020-06-22: RSOC to review the plan that defines when it is appropriate to regenerate the output formats of RFCs and what version control mechanisms should be used, and provide feedback on the RSOC list. * Deadline: 2020-07-06. - 2020-06-22: John Levine to document the factors that appear to contribute to the very low adoption by authors of v3 XML as a submission format. * Deadline: July RSOC meeting, 2020-07-20. New: - 2020-07-20: John Levine to write up a proposal for a version control mechanism for RFC output formats have been regenerated. * Deadline: 2020-07-27 - 2020-07-20: Jay Daley to take the proposed version control mechanism for RFC outputs that are regenerated to legal counsel and ask if it will be sufficient for responding to subpoenas. Deadline: 2020-08-10 - 2020-07-20: Sarah Banks, Jay Daley, Sandy Ginoza, and John Levine to act as a design team and propose a new SLA for the RSOC to review. * Deadline: 2020-08-10. MINUTES --------------------------------- 1. Administrivia The minutes of the 2020-06-22 RSOC meeting were approved. 2. v3 Issues and Tools The RSOC discussed when it is appropriate to regenerate the output formats of RFCs and what version control mechanisms should be used. John Levine said that he thinks existing RFCs will only need to be regenerated once, after the v3 grammar is declared final. Sarah Banks said that the RSOC had previously agreed that there should be the ability to regenerate the output formats of RFCs, but that they were still looking for what criteria would be used to determine when that should happen, and also what version control mechanisms would be used for RFCs that are re-rendered. John Levine said that he did not think it would be necessary to regenerate the output formats after the v3 grammar is finalized, since the output formats are not canonical; any re-rendering would be cosmetic. Jay Daley noted that there may be undiscovered bugs that would merit re-rendering; for example, if a bug in an output format caused data in a table to be munged, re-rendering the output formats to correct that bug might result in different text than when the documents were originally rendered from the canonical XML, even if the XML had not changed. He also noted that regenerating the output formats might result in page breaks being different, which might be an issue for legal subpoenas. Jay Daley asked how the RFC Series would version control the output formats in the cases when the outputs needed to be re-rendered. Sandy Ginoza noted that some documents have already been re-rendered once; in that case, the original files were saved in a different directory, and the RPC has a note that that the files were re-rendered on a certain date. The regenerated files were given the same file names as the original files so that they could remain easily found. Sarah Banks asked how the consumer would know that the document they were reading had been regenerated at some point. John Levine said that in the HTML and PDF-A outputs, there is a line in the the code that notes which version of the tools were used to render the document, but there is no such metadata for the TXT outputs. Jay Daley suggested adding the rendering date to the filename. Adam Roach noted that since the output formats are no longer canonical, they could add a header or footer to the text files that includes the rendering date; this would avoid changing the file name for people who expect RFC filenames to follow a certain pattern. Sarah Banks asked if pointing to the metadata for the HTML and PDF outputs would be sufficient when responding to a subpoena. John Levine replied that according to previous conversations with legal counsel, as long as the text doesn't change, it doesn't matter if the output is re-rendered. Sandy Ginoza added that if the RPC receives a subpoena for a document that was re-rendered, the RPC will need to run a diff on both files, and let the requestor know which document was available on what dates. John Levine suggested that the RPC give all versions of an RFC in response to a subpoena. Sarah Banks asked John Levine to write up the current proposal for what version control mechanisms should be used for output formats that are re-rendered (e.g. including the date rendered in the metadata for PDF-A and HTML files, adding a footer with the date rendered for text files). Jay Daley will take that proposal to legal counsel and ask if it will be sufficient for responding to subpoenas. * Action item: John Levine to write up a proposal for a version control mechanism for RFC output formats have been regenerated. Deadline: 2020-07-27 * Action item: Jay Daley to take the proposed version control mechanism for RFC outputs that are regenerated to legal counsel and ask if it will be sufficient for responding to subpoenas. Deadline: 2020-08-10 John Levine noted that he has reached out to authors to ask about the factors that are contributing to the low adoption of v3 XML as a submission format, but has not heard back yet. Sarah Banks suggested that if he did not get a response by the next RSOC meeting that this action item be dropped. Jay Daley noted that the IETF LLC has an RFP out for a review of current landscape of IETF document processing tools; the results of this project will likely be useful information for RSOC. 3. SLA The RSOC discussed whether to run an unofficial "shadow SLA" in order to assess what the RPC's actual SLA should be under v3. * Action item: Sarah Banks, Jay Daley, Sandy Ginoza, and John Levine to act as a design team and propose a new SLA for the RSOC to review. Deadline: 2020-08-10. 4. Other Business There was no other business.