On 2024-12-06, at 02:28, Joel Halpern <j...@joelhalpern.com> wrote: > > While we could change the policies, historically there have been very good > reasons why "specification required" does not have "openly available" as a > requirement. Among other things, we generally don't tell other SDOs how to > do business (and expect them not to tell us how to do our business.) But we > sometimes need to cite their documents. While many of them have gotten more > open / accessible, it is by no means uniform. And there would be all sorts > of edge cases.
(Not specifically directed to Joel, who knows all this:) As with other cases of dealing with legal interference (e.g., patent claims), the idea here is to leave the WG with the means to specify more details *as appropriate for that WG*. Typically, this comes with a subsection in the IANA Considerations that provides instructions to the Designated Expert (specification required always requires a designated expert to check that the specification offered actually is one). So you may find snippets such as (*): The registration policy [BCP26] is "Specification Required" for permanent entries and "Expert Review" for provisional ones. In the second case, the experts are instructed to ascertain that a basic specification does exist, even if not complete or published yet. (RFC 9557: Here we use “Expert Review” with these instructions as a poor man's “specification required” even for the provisional ones.) The expert is also instructed to direct the registrant to provide a specification (Section 4.6 of RFC 8126 [BCP26]) but can make exceptions -- for instance, when a specification is not available at the time of registration but is likely forthcoming. (RFC9423: similar, but giving detailed instructions for “specification required” instead of hardening “expert review” to be almost that.) The point here is that not all WGs are the same, and a sweeping rule that may very well fit your WG may not fit mine. Grüße, Carsten (*) I didn’t have time for a full search — there are example that make my point here even better. _______________________________________________ rfc-interest mailing list -- rfc-interest@rfc-editor.org To unsubscribe send an email to rfc-interest-le...@rfc-editor.org
