RFC SERIES OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE (RSOC) November 16, 2020 RSOC Meeting Reported by: Cindy Morgan, IETF Secretariat ATTENDEES --------------------------------- Sarah Banks (RSOC Chair) Jay Daley (IETF LLC Board Liaison, non-voting) Tony Hansen Cullen Jennings (IAB Lead) John Levine, (Temporary RFC Series Project Manager, non-voting) Cindy Morgan (Scribe, non-voting) Peter Saint-Andre GUEST --------------------------------- Sandy Ginoza (RFC Production Center) REGRETS --------------------------------- Mark Nottingham Adam Roach RSOC DECISIONS: 2020 --------------------------------- - 2020-10-19: RSOC agrees to reimplement the RPC's previous SLA, understanding that the amount of work involved per page has increased by roughly 50% from what it was before the XML transition, and so the RPC will need to keep additional staff to meet the SLA. The SLA will go back into effect for Q4 2020, with the understanding that the imminent release of Cluster 238 will likely affect processing times. - 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: - 2020-10-19: Jay Daley to send out the survey about submission formats. - 2020-09-21: John Levine to resolve the open issues on the "RFC v3 Issues" document. - 2020-09-21: Sarah Banks to update the IAB on the current plan to reinstate the SLA. In Progress: - 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. * New Deadline: 2021-01-07 - 2020-09-21: John Levine to draft a message to the community asking for input on how to handle version control for RFC output formats that have been regenerated and send it to the RSOC for review. * Deadline: 2020-10-30. * Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11fQn_3P0ZXWnbcfy45yzcHwqH-tuSRoVdC8prrDYGnI/edit - 2020-09-21: Jay Daley, John Levine, Henrik Levkowetz, Peter Saint- Andre, and Robert Sparks to work with Sandy Ginoza to propose a minimum profile of v3 XML tags to be added by the RPC. * Deadline: 2020-10-21 Updated: - 2020-10-19: Sarah Banks to send a note drafted by Jay Daley to the RFC XML and Style Guide change management team asking them to work with the RPC to propose the minimum profile of v3 XML tags to be added by the RPC. * Deadline: 2020-10-23 New: - 2020-11-16: Jay Daley to digest the data from the submission formats survey and summarize it for the RSOC. * Deadline: 2021-01-07 MINUTES --------------------------------- 1. Administrivia The minutes of the 2020-10-19 RSOC meeting were approved. 2. v3 Issues and Tools Jay Daley reported that he sent out the survey about submission formats. The next step will be to digest the results and see what can be learned from them. * Action item: Jay Daley to review the data from the submission formats survey and summarize it for the RSOC. Peter Saint-Andre said that he may have time to help review the survey data; Jay Daley will ping him off-list about that. Once RSOC has the analysis of the submission formats survey results, John Levine will document the factors that appear to contribute to the very low adoption by authors of v3 XML as a submission format. John Levine noted that he has started asking about submission formats in the monthly survey he sends to authors who have recently published RFCs. The responses so far indicate that most people do not know what version of XML they are using, which leads John to believe it is a documentation and tool flow problem. Jay Daley suggested recommending a change to the XML that would insert something that says what tool produced it. John Levine reported that a blog post on the RFC v3 XML Issues was published on 2020-11-03. Jay Daley observed that there has been little to no feedback. John Levine has drafted a message to the community asking for input on how to handle version control for RFC output formats that have been regenerated. Sarah Banks asked John to send the text to the RSOC for review. 3. RFC XML and Style Guide change management team Jay Daley noted that the RSOC Chair still needs to send the email to the RFC XML and Style Guide change management team asking them to work with the RPC to propose the minimum profile of v3 XML tags to be added by the RPC. Sarah Banks asked if the team has met in the past month. John Levine replied that they have not. Peter Saint-Andre will send an email to the team to kick things off. Jay Daley asked the RSOC if they had any objections to Henrik Levkowetz continuing to be a part of the RFC XML and Style Guide change management team on a volunteer basis once his current contract ends at the end of the year. RSOC had no objections. 4. SLA Sarah Banks updated the IAB on the current plan to reinstate the SLA in an email on 2020-10-28. Sandy Ginoza reported that she does not think the SLA will be met for Q4 because there are still 80-something documents in AUTH48 with extended processing times. Sarah Banks asked when Cluster 238 is expected to be published. Sandy Ginoza replied that she hopes it will happen during Q4, but there are still 14 documents waiting on author approvals, and she cannot say when the final approvals will come. 5. Page Numbers in RFCs The RSOC discussed whether IETF tools can produce RFC output with page numbers, and whether that decision is an RSOC decision or a Tools Team decision. Cullen Jennings noted that the tools that produce RFCs are all open source and if someone put in a pull request against one of them, it would not be RSOC that decided whether to grant the pull request. Sarah Banks said that whether there are page numbers or not falls under the purview of the RSE as part of the style guide. Cullen Jennings replied that that is true for the official output formats, but there is nothing to stop someone from generating their own unofficial output. Jay Daley will follow up with Robert Sparks and let him know that RSOC does not believe that the decision about whether to allow IETF tools to produce RFC output with page numbers falls under RSOC's purview. The official RFC outputs on rfc-editor.org will continue to not have page numbers. 6. Requests to RSOC from IAB The RSOC discussed the request from the IAB to announce the creation of the "RFC XML and Style Guide change management team" on the IETF discussion list, given that it had already been announced on the RFC- interest list. The RSOC concluded that since the discussion is already happening on the RFC-interest list, and creating such teams is within RSOC's purview, there was no need to also announce it on the IETF discussion list. Cullen Jennings will send an email to the IAB explaining this decision. 7. Next RSOC Meeting The RSOC agreed to change the date of their next meeting to Monday, 2020-12-14. The meeting time will remain at 15:00 PST. 8. Other Business Sandy Ginoza reported that she had a discussion during the RPC's office hours at IETF 109 about the AUTH48 process, and whether (a) authors should be asked to review all output formats of RFCs, (b) the RPC should tell authors which version to review, or (c) the RPC should ask authors which version(s) they reviewed so they have that information if questions arise later. The RSOC agreed that this is a question worth thinking about. This will come back to the RSOC for further discussion at their December meeting.