RFC Policies

Author:Stephan Krause, Stephan Meißl
Date:2011-05-13

This document contains the policies that govern the life cycle of Requests for Comments (RFCs). It may be changed by submitting an RFC for discussion and vote following the provisions of this document.

In this document the terms shall, should and may have a normative meaning, that is well known from software engineering and standards definition:

  • shall: indicates an absolute requirement to be strictly followed
  • should: indicates a recommendation
  • may: indicates an option

Status of RFCs

Every RFC has a status. That status may be one of:

  • IN PREPARATION: Some text for the RFC has been posted, but that is not the version to be submitted for discussion and voting. An RFC that has this status is still work in progress.
  • PENDING: The text of the RFC has been submitted for discussion. It may still be altered by the RFC authors in order to reflect the state of the discussion.
  • WITHDRAWN: The text of the RFC has been withdrawn.
  • VOTING ACTIVE: The text of the RFC has been frozen and voting is going on.
  • ACCEPTED: A vote has been held on the RFC and it has been accepted. Implementation has started.
  • REJECTED: A vote has been held on the RFC and it has been rejected. The RFC is not going to be implemented and the discussion is closed.
  • POSTPONED: A vote has been held on the RFC and it has been postponed to a later stage of development. The RFC may be reopened any time.
  • OBSOLETE: A vote has been held on the RFC and it has been declared obsolete. It has been superseded by another RFC or it is not considered applicable any more.

The status IN PREPARATION may be declared by the authors of the RFC. They may move it to PENDING once they consider it ready for discussion and submission to a vote. Any further status changes shall be declared according to the results of the discussion and the voting (see RFC 0: Project Steering Committee Guidelines).

The following status changes are possible:

  • from IN PREPARATION to PENDING, WITHDRAWN
  • from PENDING to WITHDRAWN or via VOTING ACTIVE to ACCEPTED, REJECTED, POSTPONED
  • from ACCEPTED via VOTING ACTIVE to PENDING, POSTPONED, OBSOLETE
  • from POSTPONED to PENDING or via VOTING ACTIVE to ACCEPTED, REJECTED, OBSOLETE

Creation of RFCs

Any one who has write access to the EOxServer SVN may submit an RFC. It shall obey the rules of the Guidelines for Requests for Comments. The initial status of the RFC is IN PREPARATION, lest the authors deem it to be mature for discussion from the start, in which case they may submit it as PENDING. The RFC shall be assigned the next possible consecutive number.

When beginning work on an RFC the authors shall inform the PSC chair.

As long as the RFC is IN PREPARATION or PENDING, only the authors of the RFC shall edit it. Anyone else who wants to contribute to the document shall submit his or her text to the discussion page. The authors may also decide to let him or her become a co-author who has all the rights of an author.

Authors may choose to support their RFC by implementing the needed changes and committing them to a subdirectory of the sandbox directory for review.

Discussion Pages

Any RFC, especially those still IN PREPARATION, shall have a discussion page on the EOxServer Trac Wiki (http://eoxserver.org/wiki). The design and the location of the discussion page is detailed in the Guidelines for Requests for Comments.

The discussion page may include links to preliminary implementations which have been committed to a sandbox subdirectory.

Pending RFCs

PENDING RFCs are submitted for discussion. They may still be edited to reflect the state of the discussion or to correct errors. They should not be altered in a radical manner though, changing the proposed solution completely. In this case the authors may withdraw the RFC and propose another one.

An RFC shall be PENDING for at least two business days (in Austria) till a vote can be held on it (see RFC 0: Project Steering Committee Guidelines).

Withdrawal of RFCs

The authors may withdraw an RFC at any time as long as it is IN PREPARATION or PENDING. The RFC status will change to WITHDRAWN. The authors may decide to leave the text as is or remove everything except for the basic information as defined in the Guidelines for Requests for Comments.

Voting on RFCs

The voting on RFCs is defined in the first RFC: RFC 0: Project Steering Committee Guidelines.