Subject: 48 Hours: a small number of edits please!!

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 14:05:15 -0400

Recently, I (and other ADs) have seen a large number of edits
requested during the RFC Editor's "48 hours" period. Just this week,
I've seen a case where the authors are requesting _278_ edits.  This
can cause difficulties and extra work and needs to be
discouraged. Some issues:

 - By the time "48 hours" arrives, the RFC editor has invested quite a
   bit of time on a document. Having it make a bunch of additional
   edits at this point increases their work load, and indeed, if the
   changes had just been made to the ID before the RFC editor started
   their work, it's basically wasted work.

 - When the IESG approves a document, it approves a specific
   version. _Any_ changes after that point need to be properly
   reviewed so that no changes that the WG and/or IESG would have an
   issue with slip in. This is not generally a problem in practice
   when only a small number of edits are proposed.

 - As the number of edits increases, it becomes more important to get
   proper sign off from the IESG and WG for changes. At some point,
   the best process is to remove the document from the RFC queue, send
   it back to the WG, and then restart the review process. This
   recently happened in the EAP WG after a large number of edits were
   proposed. However, this is not a good thing to do in general, in
   that if folk start to get a sense that this is a common occurrence,
   "IESG approval" of a document becomes less meaningful. I.e., folk
   will no longer have confidence that a document is really "done"
   once the IESG approves it (since it might get yanked out of the
   approval queue).

 - When the IESG approves a specific ID, that ID should _NOT_ be
   revised again (e.g., by submitting an update) without close
   coordination with your ADs (i.e,. their explicit approval!). First,
   confusion and additional work can arise if the RFC editor works off
   of the "approved" version and only later finds out that a revision
   exists. Second, the IESG will need to properly approve the
   revision, since (from a process perspective) it has approved an
   earlier version, increasing the IESG's work (and risking having the
   IESG raise some new issue).

To summarize, there is no hard-and-fast rule for how many edits are
too many, but as a general rule, once the IESG has approved a
document, the document should really only be modified to fix technical
errors that need fixing in the final RFC or to correct obvious typos,
update author's contact info, etc. And all such changes (other than
obvious ones) should (of course) be reviewed by the WG for good
measure. On the other hand, doing "one more editing pass" and in
effect rewriting the document to make it more readable is totally
inappropriate at this stage of the game.

Thomas