Subject: Re: [rfc-i] rfc-interest Digest, Vol 188, Issue 3

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 20:52:06 -0400

--On Thursday, June 11, 2020 15:08:06 -0400
 "Andrew G. Malis" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Mike,
> 
> That sounds good, or, if you want to be more wordy, "any RFC
> published by an IETF Working Group that is not a
> standards-track or Experimental specification."

Andy,

(I knew I should continue to stay away from this list)

Anything along the lines of "anything that is not one of those
is one of these" is looking for trouble. 

First, while we have lumped BCP documents in with standards
track for many purposes in the last several years, RFC 2026 is
extremely clear that BCP documents are not standards track ones.
Second, while it it isn't clear to me just how we would go about
doing it if we wanted to (perhaps an opportunity for another
long "who has the authority" thread in rfc-future), one could
imagine another full, numbered, category along the lines of the
last "FYI" series or perhaps similar to the ISO technical report
category (IIR, "Type 3"0 which was popularly known as a
"substandard".

While I see these Informational subcategories as a good idea, I
think it would be equally, or more, useful to break BCP up (or,
I suppose, create subcategories) to distinguish between IETF
procedural documents and documents about practices on the
Internet and the use of protocols.  It might even be useful to
further divide the latter between descriptions of deployed
configurations, operational practices, etc., that have worked
out well (after all, "Current Practices") and more aspirational
IETF recommendations about what people should be doing (with or
without advice about what happens if they don't).  Most of the
latter, of course, should probably be seen as Applicability
Statements and hence actually standards track.

best,
   john

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---

From: "Andrew G. Malis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:22:27 -0400

John,

Sure, sounds good. I think Mike would appreciate a proposed Informational
taxonomy.

Cheers,
Andy