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Draft Submission check: Warn on "no-derivatives" boilerplate. #4854

Open wkumari opened 1 year ago

wkumari commented 1 year ago

Description

We recently ran into an issue where a WG document made it all the way to (just before) IETF LC with the "no-derivatives" boilerplate: "This document may not be modified, and derivative works of it may not be created, except to format it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other than English."

As RFC5378, Sec 3.3 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5378#section-3.3) says: The right to produce derivative works must be granted in order for an IETF working group to accept a Contribution as a working group document or otherwise work on it.

In this particular case the authors had simply started from the wrong template, and did not intend to include the "no-derivatives" bit (and so we easily addressed it), but this has caused more serious issues in the past.

Ideally the chairs (and WG, and AD) would notice this, but, well, many people just skip over the boilerplate.

It would be great if the DT could pop up a pre-submission warning if a draft includes this boilerplate. Even better would be if the DT could warn the chairs/WG if a WG (draft-ietf-wg-) document contains it, but I don't know how the UI should implement this, and I don't want to make the submission flow more complicated...

One option would be that the DT could refuse to allow posting of draft-ietf-foo-bar-00, and the secretariat would be able to override if this were ever needed (e.g when posting an update to RFC5378 which may contain it as example text, or if we publish a WG document that does actually need it because it was developed in another SDO, or...)

Another, less ideal, but perhaps easier option might just be to allow it to be submitted, but then prominently display a warning in the list of WG documents.

Happy to provide more details if helpful....

(This was discussed with the IESG, and the consensus is that it would be great if the DT could check for this...)

Code of Conduct

rjsparks commented 1 year ago

Duplicate of #1463. This has been stuck for a long time waiting for an architectural shift around idnits. We're changing direction on what we're going to do about that and this should come back into queue soon.