Table of Contents
Reissuing a Publication Version of an RFC
Guidelines
Note: The terms “definitive format” and “publication version” are used as defined in Section 1.1 of RFC 9720.
As noted in Section 3 of RFC 9720:
The RPC is permitted but not required to reissue publication versions of an RFC, as described in Section 1.2. In deciding whether to update the publication versions of an RFC, the RPC will take into account both the risk of semantic changes and consistency of the Series.
Below are the criteria for reissuing a publication version, where one or more publication versions of an RFC is posted *without* replacing the XML file. A publication version (TXT, HTML, and/or PDF) for a particular RFC may be reissued if all of the following conditions are true:
- An error materially affects at least one of the rendered outputs (e.g., text is missing).
- The error is a result of the conversion tools and correction does not require changes to the definitive format.
- Had the issue been identified earlier, publication of the affected document would have been delayed until the issue was fixed.
Process
The defective file will be moved to a separate, publicly available directory https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rerendered/, which contains a README explaining the purpose of the directory. The reissued file will replace the defective file, and the replacement will be announced on the ietf-announce and rfc-dist mailing lists, which are the standard communication channels for announcing the publication of RFCs. A note will be added to the RFC's datatracker History tab.
List of files that have been reissued
| RFC number | File(s) reissued | Date | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| RFC 8677 | 2024-12-19, announcement | PDF rerendered so that list numbering is corrected in Section 6.2.2. (See https://github.com/ietf-tools/xml2rfc/pull/1055) | |
| RFC 8680 | 2024-12-19, announcement | PDF rerendered so that list numbering is corrected in Section 4.3. (See https://github.com/ietf-tools/xml2rfc/pull/1055) | |
| RFC 8681 | 2024-12-19, announcement | PDF rerendered so that list numbering is corrected in Section 1.4. (See https://github.com/ietf-tools/xml2rfc/pull/1055) | |
| RFC 8994 | 2024-12-19, announcement | PDF rerendered so that list numbering is corrected in Section 6.2.3. (See https://github.com/ietf-tools/xml2rfc/pull/1055) | |
| RFC 9019 | 2022-12-19, announcement | PDF rerendered so that Figures 2 and 3 are not cut off. (See https://github.com/ietf-tools/xml2rfc/pull/788) |
April 2020 batch reissuing of PDF files
Announced on rfc-interest on 1 May 2020:
FYI, the PDF files for the 116 most recent RFCs have been replaced with PDF/A-3. This replacement was necessary due to our error when invoking the conversion to PDF/A-3 since October 2019.
The files have been replaced in order to follow the recommendations in Section 2 of RFC 7995 -- specifically, providing PDF/A-3 with conformance level “U” and with the XML source file embedded. The new files have the same content, but have been converted to PDF/A-3 using pdfaPilot [1]. See [2] for the list of files; this affects the RFCs published in the new RFC format [3].
As an aside, this was a file conversion of the existing PDF, rather than a re-rendering of the PDF (using the current version of xml2rfc), although the latter is explicitly permitted and may be done in the future.
[1] https://www.callassoftware.com/en/products/pdfapilot
[2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/materials/pdfs_converted_2020-04-17.txt
[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/format-live/
