Subject: Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:34:50 GMT

The RFC series has long been THE archival series for the Internet.  To
avoid Internet Drafts becoming another archival series, thus creating
great confusion, the IETF has chosen to make Internet Draft ephemeral,
timing out after 6 months.  Indeed, that is why they are called
DRAFTS.

The intent is that when good & useful information and ideas are
published in Internet Drafts, they should become Informational RFCs if
they merit preservation and referencing.

A Working Group sometimes accumulates a froth of subsidiary drafts with
information that is worth preserving, but ancilliary to the primary
standards-track work of the group.  The chairs should take steps to
turn these into Informational RFCs.  This was the case for the RSVP
working group, for example; I know of at least once such "left-over"
I-D that should have been published as Informational.  It did not
happen because the working group chairs were tired; however, it was
their failure in this case.  I expect that similar cases exist in other
working groups.

Bob Braden

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From: Magnus Danielson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 18:12:25 +0200

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: An Internet Draft as reference material
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:34:50 GMT

> their failure in this case.  I expect that similar cases exist in other

It is precisely this mechanism that I am refering to and I was trying to point
out that it is being less used than what is possibly wise to do.

Naturally we should not overuse it either, since that would create an flood of
RFCs (and we now count less and less days between each new series of 100 RFCs)
and this is also not a good thing.

The concentration on getting new protocol specs out there tends to have us
forget these longer term issues.

As a thread of IDs is being terminated without having it progressing up the
standard track, it should be done with the question "Are we really sure there
is nothing in this work not worthy of an Informational RFC?". Used correctly it
could help to provide some of the missing pieces of the pussel. It is not a
full state dump we are doing, rather trying to save some fundamental
intermediate states which helps in restoration of history.

When IPv6 is going to be replaced, how many people will recall all the
background for the decissions made (good or bad, we don't know all of them
yeat)? How many will have the healt to even participate?

I think we have reason to consider how to deal with these issues and improve
the state-saving. Just look at the efforts to bring early (pre-RFC700) RFCs
online.

So, lets ponder some over these issues and see if there is not something we can
do to improve the state of things.

Cheers,
Magnus

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From: "Charles E. Perkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 09:23:04 -0700

Hello Bob,

> they merit preservation and referencing.

But the problem is that they don't, and there are too many
cracks to fall through.

- A draft often needs a LOT of work before it could become
  Informational.  This is especially true since the IESG wants
  to be somewhat careful about what gets out as an RFC.

- Sometimes drafts have some BAD ideas mixed in with the
  GOOD ideas.

- Sometimes drafts are _partially_ superseded by later
  work (note this is almost the same as the last point).

- Sometimes drafts are just put out there to stimulate
  thought/controversy/further work.  The authors may have
  no interest in doing any more work on it after that.
  Not that I myself would ever do such a thing.

- As you point out, people do move on, especially in the IETF.

If someone _wants_ to provide proper attribution in order
to live up to honorable objectives of intellectual honesty,
then it would be convenient for them to be able to cite
the original work (i.e., the Internet Draft).  Clearly, it
is not the IETF's _responsibility_ to provide this archival
service.  We _may_ wish to accept a _new_ responsibility,
or maybe not.

I suggest that ISOC consider creation of such a service.

Regards,
Charlie P.

PS. 40 Gbytes < $200.

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From: "Simon St.Laurent" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:47:04 -0400

>do to improve the state of things.

Would there be any objection to setting up an I-D vault, where Internet
Drafts could have a permanent archive?

I reference Internet Drafts on a regular basis for xmlhack.com, and it's
disturbing that our archived stories frequently point to no-longer-existing
files at the IETF. 

We report on development as it happens, whether or not it has achieved RFC
status, and maintain an archive of our stories.  Maintaining the archive to
ensure that IETF links remain clear is not a lot of fun, to say the least.

For examples of IETF stories at xmlhack, see:
http://www.xmlhack.com/list.php?cat=27

One of my favorite things about W3C process is their insistence on
archiving all public drafts.  It makes it easy to check on the development
of specs and figure out what happened when.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:48:07 -0400

> they merit preservation and referencing.

I think the issue that most people are having with this is that quite
often, for whatever reason, we are losing insight as to why things were
done the way they were.  Yes, we see what finally ended up in RFC1341
for MIME, and the updates thereof.  However, that document was *nothing*
like what the early drafts contained, and some things that were the cause
of vehement debate in the working group and finally decided on One Final Way
to do things are mostly hand-waved over in the final RFC (for instance, the
ban on certain Content-Transfer-Encodings on multipart/ and message/ bodytypes
is in RFC1341 just listed as "Can add considerable complexity", but the
effect it has on message/partial (which was a major motivating cause for the
message wars in the working group) isn't actually referenced in the RFC.

RFC1521, section 7.3.2, *did* contain a long paragraph explaining the
problem.  

However, the vast majority of RFC's come out and are NOT lucky enough to
get another revision like that.

Although, actually, what would *really* benefit the historians would be
searchable archives of the working group mailing lists, but that's a
different issue.... ;)

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

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From: John Day <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 16:01:06 -0400

>their failure in this case.  I expect that similar cases exist in other

I would have to agree with a number of other people who have replied 
to this email.  There does need to be an archive of I-Ds.   There are 
many I-Ds that were written several years ago that are still 
referenced often and pointed at.  I am thinking of several in the 
areas of addressing and routing that while they never lead to 
standards and some never were intended to provide a good piece of 
background or analysis of problems we have faced and the thinking 
that went into them.  (Often the answer isn't enough, new issues may 
require re-visiting why we went where we did.  For example, recently 
I wanted to find the old arguments from the ROAD process about how 
many addresses we need.  It was very difficult to find.  There are 
many similar examples.)

I-Ds are for the most part contributions to the process of creating a 
standard.  It would be inappropriate for most of them to be made even 
Informational RFCs.  While it may be worthwhile to retire I-Ds as 
active for a group's consideration after 6 months, it would be good 
if they were kept.  (Actually, I am surprised they are not. Generally 
they are kept as part of the paper trail in case some should sue that 
they were not given due consideration.  One can go to the paper trail 
to show that due consideration was given.  The email archive is one 
part of that but without the I-Ds they talk about it might not be 
sufficient.)

But overall, I believe that these are valuable to keep for historical 
reasons at the very least.  I have seen too many cases where people 
writing books have made up the history because it seemed reasonable 
rather than go dig through the sources.  It will be even worse if the 
sources don't exist.  (Then some day in the future someone will 
decide that we did this because there was something to hide!!!!   God 
forbid!)  There needs to be an I-D archive.

Frankly, the RFC space is overloaded to the point that it is very 
confusing to the uninitiated as to what the documents are, standards, 
some early ones are just observations, comments on documents, etc. 
It would much less confusing to the outside world if an RFC were just 
one thing.   Even ISO distinguishes Standards from Technical Reports, 
i..e. Informational RFCs or BCPs.

Take care,
John

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From: "RL 'Bob' Morgan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:31:47 -0700 (PDT)

> There needs to be an I-D archive.

1.  Get together with everyone else who agrees with you and buy a machine
and a net connection.

2.  Write a script to get all new I-Ds (easy to do via automated
processing of ietf-announce).

3.  Make them freely available to all.

4.  Post a note about the archive once a month to the IETF list.

 - RL "Bob"

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From: Rob Lanphier <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 19:14:43 -0700

>4.  Post a note about the archive once a month to the IETF list.

Most of this has already been done.  See:
http://community.roxen.com/developers/idocs/

However:
A.  I'm not sure if it was ever announced to this list
B.  It's not entirely clear that expired drafts don't expire at this 
location, until you hunt around a bit.
C.  There's no explicit permanence to this location.  It could come and go, 
though there's no immediate indication that this is the case.

It would be useful to have a semi-blessed location that one could be 
confident will be there five years from now, for all of the reasons in the 
"Cool URIs Don't Change" essay 
(http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI).  Perhaps this is just a matter of 
the Roxen folks committing to keeping this as a permanent resource, and/or 
perhaps registering an appropriate domain such that it can be permanent.

Rob

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 15:00:47 -0700

At 07:14 PM 9/20/00 -0700, Rob Lanphier wrote:
>perhaps registering an appropriate domain such that it

that raises the question of likelihood.  how likely is it that Roxen will 
be around 10 or 20 years from now?  how likely is it that an IETF 
Secretariat will be around 10-20 years from now?

If we are going to have an archival facility, it needs to be run by a 
stable group with high probability of staying around.

d/