Subject: Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

From: Mark Allman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 20:05:52 -0400

> Making a 'publish it as an RFC or discard it' claim may be nice
> rhetorically, but it's not a very useful answer to the problem
> being raised.

So, lots of places have facilities for publishing technical reports.
If an I-D author believes that something should be kept around but
for whatever reason (e.g., lack of concensus) it is not going to be
published as an RFC let the author stamp a TR number on it.  Of
course, these would not be as easy to find as if we just kept old
I-Ds, but a short note to the appropriate WG mailing with a URL
would keep a reference in the mail arhive, at least.

I've used the above system for a document that consensus dictated be
winnowed down from its original wonderfulness. :)

It's not necessarily a perfect solution, but neither is keeping
every I-D ever issued.

allman

---
http://roland.grc.nasa.gov/~mallman/

---

From: "Ole J. Jacobsen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 20:57:01 -0700 (PDT)

In this modern age of HyperText, a nice solution (at least from the point
of view of publishers, librarians, historians and the like) would be to
have documents essentially stay around forever except that the *content*
would be updated.

So, if you go looking for I-D-warren-silflay-rules-07.txt, you will find
an essentially empty document which says "Nobody could agree on the
silflay rules, so this document expired in August 1998" or "This document
became "Adams R., The Rules for Orderly Silflay," RFC 9876, July 2000.

I have been told that this is actually done for some, but not all I-Ds.

Now go search the web for "silflay".

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen 
Editor and Publisher
The Internet Protocol Journal
Cisco Systems, Office of the CSO
Tel: +1 408-527-8972
e-mail: [email-masked]
URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj

---

From: Garrett Wollman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 00:05:42 -0400 (EDT)

> If an I-D author believes that something should be kept around but

Whether the author wants it to be kept around or not is immaterial.
As a practical matter, many I-Ds are in fact archived -- in the
archives of the various mailing-lists in which their contents are
discussed.  However, such archives have decided disadvantages as the
canonical references for an old draft.

This issue is whether other people (historians, journalists,
documenters) can create, in their own *permanent* works, a permanent
reference to the contents of an Internet-Draft.

Even as an implementor, if I write code to implement a technique or
protocol described in an Internet-Draft, I want that draft to stay
around at least as long as the revision history of that code lasts
(possibly ten or twenty years) -- and if the IETF won't provide that
permanence, I might as well just plonk the draft down in my repository
alongside the code.  (Whether the code implementing the draft is ever
formally released or not is immaterial -- for many of us in the OSS
community, ``releases'' are effectively instantaneous.)

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman   | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same
[email-masked]  | O Siem / The fires of freedom 
Opinions not those of| Dance in the burning flame
MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA|                     - Susan Aglukark and Chad Irschick