RFC SERIES OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE (RSOC) January 26, 2021 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) Mark Nottingham Peter Saint-Andre GUEST --------------------------------- Sandy Ginoza (RFC Production Center) REGRETS --------------------------------- Adam Roach RSOC DECISIONS: 2021 --------------------------------- - 2020 Decisions: - 2019 Decisions: ACTION ITEM REVIEW --------------------------------- Done: - 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. - 2020-11-16: Jay Daley to digest the data from the submission formats survey and summarize it for the RSOC. - 2020-12-14: Cindy Morgan to propose a timeline and process to select the RSOC Chair for 2021. * Deadline: 2020-12-18 In Progress: - 2020-12-14: John Levine to send a message to the community asking for input on how to handle version control for RFC output formats that have been regenerated. * Deadline: 2021-01-29 - 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 that the RPC would add before publication of an RFC if they were not included by the authors. * Deadline: 2021-02 - 2020-12-14: Sarah Banks to forward Heather Flanagan's previous RPC review to the RSOC. * Deadline: 2020-12-21 New: - 2021-01-26: John Levine to start a discussion with the community about whether the XML of an RFC can be changed as long as the text remains immutable. * Deadline: 2021-02-08 - 2021-01-26: Jay Daley and John Levine will work with the RPC to propose changes to the boilerplate AUTH48 message that is sent to authors and to the text on the RFC Editor site, in order to clarify that this is approval stage and what needs to be approved. * Deadline: 2021-02 MINUTES --------------------------------- 1. Administrivia The minutes of the 2020-12-14 RSOC meeting were approved. 2. v3 Issues and Tools Jay Daley drafted a report on the authoring survey and sent it to the RSOC for review. The report includes a number of recommendations on how to encourage authors to submit v3 XML. Once comments have been incorporated from RSOC, the Tools Team, and the Tools Architecture and Strategy Team, Jay plans to make the report public. John Levine reported that he has drafted a message to the community asking for input on how to handle version control for RFC output formats that have been regenerated. He plans to send the message out by 2021-01-29. 3. RFC XML and Style Guide change management team Peter Saint-Andre reported that the RFC XML and Style Guide change management team has met twice so far, and is working through some of the stickier issues. At their next meeting, they will put together a work plan on how to proceed with the remaining open issues in GitHub (https://github.com/rfc-format/draft-iab-xml2rfc-v3-bis/issues). Mark Nottingham noted that this team is making a proposal, not making resolutions. He suggested that it would be good for the proposal to include a background document (perhaps an IAB-stream RFC) with the rationale for the proposed changes. In November, John Levine published a blog post (https://www.ietf.org/blog/rfc-v3-xml-issues/) on the RFC v3 XML Issues that discussed the possibility of changing the XML of published RFCs in order to use a stable v3 XML and retroactively update some of the semantic markup. Both issues come back to the idea that RFCs, once published, are immutable. The switch to XML as the canonical format has introduced some new issues that may require a more nuanced approach that maintains the immutability of the text of an RFC while allowing for limited circumstances under which the formatting and/or semantic markup of an RFC can change after publication. Mark Nottingham said that if there was community buy-in to allow the XML to be updated within certain constraints, that would allow for significant flexibility. John Levine replied that there is a small number of people who are very resistant to that idea. Mark suggested that having a public conversation on the topic might lead to some kind of rough consensus. * Action item: John Levine to start a discussion with the community about whether the XML of an RFC can be changed as long as the text remains immutable. 4. RPC Review John Levine noted that he is still waiting for Sarah Banks to send him a copy of the RPC's previous review. 5. AUTH48 Process The RSOC discussed what exactly authors should be asked to review and sign off on during the AUTH48 process. Sandy Ginoza suggested several options: (a) Authors should be asked to review all output formats of RFCs. (b) The RPC should tell authors which output version to review. (c) The RPC should ask authors which version(s) they reviewed so they have that information if questions arise later. Mark Nottingham said that asking for review is not the right way to phrase the questions. Authors need to know that the XML is the canonical format, and that there are implications of not reviewing it. He noted that during the publication of the last RFC he authored, he learned that there are many changes made to the XML that may not be obvious when looking at other formats. Jay Daley said that AUTH48 is about reviewing the content to make sure that it has not changed, reviewing the output formats that show how the content will be presented, and reviewing the semantic markup of the content. Cullen Jennings suggested that the RPC is really looking for approval during AUTH48, rather than review. AUTH48 is the authors' last chance to make changes to the document before the final version is approved for publication. * Action item: Jay Daley and John Levine will work with the RPC to propose changes to the boilerplate AUTH48 message that is sent to authors and to the text on the RFC Editor site, in order to clarify that this is approval stage and what needs to be approved. 6. Next RSOC Meeting Since the next regularly-scheduled RSOC meeting is on a holiday in the U.S., Cindy Morgan will send out a Doodle poll to schedule the RSOC's February meeting. 7. Executive Session: RSOC Chair The RSOC Chair selection was discussed in an executive session.