I largely agree, and think this is worth a LOT of time exploring.
But as John Klensin may well remind us, this is a very long-standing
problem that the IETF side of the house has failed to tackle for the
last 25 years or so. It will take something amounting to a revolution
to make significant changes.
Oh, I know, starting with the question about whether immutable RFCs is a
sacred principle, or just a leftover from the era when they were
mimeographed.
R's,
John
On 08.07.2026 03:54, Eric Rescorla wrote:
On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 6:36 PM John Levine <[email protected]> wrote:
It appears that Martin Thomson <[email protected]> said:
>Pulling back to Brian's email, because the discussion has wandered
off.
>
>I reach a different conclusion. It's not really broken as it is.
I'd draw a different conclusion. We really need a better way to update
our
standards.
Unsurprisingly, I agree with this.
Other SDOs manage to publish updated editions of their standards with
a process
to add or change parts of them without having to reissue the whole
thing.
Here is a potentially nonexclusive list of cases, in rough order from
smallest to biggest:
- Editorial (non-semantic) changes (typos, rewrites, etc.)
- Clarifications that are theoretically semantic (e.g., fixing things
where
everyone agrees what the the spec should say but it doesn't
say it or it's unclear).
- Isolated semantic changes (e.g., forbidding algorithms, adding
new algorithms, etc.)
- Significant extensions (something like TLS ECH)
- Total rewrites
One important question is how high in this ladder we can go
while maintaining a single document. My personal inclination
is pretty high, up to and including some extensions, but I
imagine others will have different beliefs.
-Ekr
I realize this is a bigger discussion than whether to put Updates: or
Amends: in
the XML header, but I think it's a real problem we've been avoiding
for a very
long time.
R's,
John
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Regards,
John Levine, [email protected], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
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