Re: Last Call: Instructions to Request for Comments (RFC) Authorsto BCP

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

Greetings again. This document is not ready to progress to RFC status 
for a very simple reason: the title does not reflect the contents of 
the document.

The title reflects a worthy cause: telling those of us who are going 
to produce RFCs what we must do and what we should do. The document, 
however, is a confused jumble of instructions to authors, what kind 
of editing the RFC Editor will do regardless of what you have turned 
in, what kind of formatting the RFC Editor will do regardless of what 
you have turned in, and what will happen during the RFC editing 
process.

At a minimum, the document needs to remove the parts about the 
editing and formatting except for the things that the RFC author MUST 
do in order for the document to be accepted. Any material that is 
duplicated from BCP 1, BCP 9, BCP 14, BCP 26, FYI 1, RFC 1311, and 
1id-guidelines absolutely must be removed in order to avoid conflicts 
in the future as any of those documents are updated.

A thought is to have this document be split into three: "RFCs", 
"Charter of the RFC Editor", and "Guidelines for Preparing RFCs". 
Without such a split, the reader will not understand what they are 
supposed to do and what the RFC Editor is supposed to do.

I'll send my editorial comments separately to the authors of the 
document. Please let me know if I should Cc them to the IESG.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium