I share John's apprehension about the words "preserved to the greatest extent possible". There are certainly many failures possible here. I don't share John's slipery slope concern that it leads to "can't trust an RFC"
I think that the goal here is allow for significant syntactical
updates to documents. That would include possibly recoding them. I'm for that.
(Imagine if the world suddenly decided UTF-16 was really the right
choice. Unlikely, but that's a syntactical change with no semantic impact).
We can fix the "postal" situation, etc.
It's also to allow us to fix gramatical, spelling and dumb situations where
we omitted the word "not" via errata.
I think that we are generally in agreement as to goals.
We could go on list things that violate the expectations.
For instance, a bits-on-the-wire change would not be semantic preserving.
I don't think it's a good idea.
Maybe someone can come up with better text than "greatest extent possible"
My view is that we should enable the RPC to do the right thing, and that we
should trust them to:
1. know what is semantic and what is syntactic
2. know when the situation is unclear to ask the stream manager (e.g., IESG)
3. trust the IESG to figure it out, and consult the community.
(Decades ago I heard about the ossification that occurs to organizations that
make more and more rules to deal with concerns like this. They eventually
can't do anything. I asked a prominent Cdn Sociologist[%], I know about what
this is called... best he could come up with was "rule based culture", and he
mentioned that there was extensive literature on this. The origin of this
problem is lack of interpersonal trust, which fundamentally boils down to not
drinking enough beer with others. We want to be a value-based culture, and
that means establishing principles, not proceedures
[%]- no, not my dad. He died in 2003. My dad's best friend.)
--
Michael Richardson <mcr+i...@sandelman.ca> . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide
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