Subject: Re: [newtrk] Change history in "ISD" considered not fully baked

From: Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Apr 2005 22:37:44 -0500

On Wed March 23 2005 21:35, Scott Bradner wrote:
> 
> > One wonders precisely how an ASCII text document is going to
> > be able to be read to determine precise status at any given
> > previous time
> 
> one (verbose) way is shown in
> draft-ietf-newtrk-sample-isd-stdproc-00.txt

I don't get it -- there are 3 sets of published errata to RFC 2026, 2
in 2002 and 1 in 2003 (http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/errata.pl),
but I see no mention of them in that draft.
.
newtrk resources:_____________________________________________________
web user interface: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~llynch/newtrk.html
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From: [email-masked] (Scott Bradner)
Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2005 07:18:49 -0400 (EDT)

> I don't get it 

it is an example of how to provide a history - I did not mean to imply 
that it covered everything

Scott

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From: Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Apr 2005 22:37:44 -0500

.

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From: Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2005 12:43:17 -0400

> that it covered everything

RFC 2026 is a fairly simple case, and that case seems to be difficult
to handle in a simple ASCII text document (such that it can be easily
read to determine status as of any time).

For more complex examples, consider DNS (multiple amendments via
multiple RFCs, several of which have multiple errata) or SMTP (ditto,
but with an initial attempt at consolidation (RFC 2821) currently at
a lower level on the Standards Track, with several published errata
to 2821 and at least one acknowledged substantive error which has not
been published anywhere.

I suspect that a single document cannot in general be constructed such
that it both
a) provides a complete record of changes according to a timeline
and
b) is easily read to determine status as of some time.
Instead, I suspect that some master document in a machine-readable
format which documents revisions coupled with a mechanism for
(re)generating readable snapshots in document format as of a particular
time might be a workable approach.
.
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