Re: [Alldispatch] Tombstones, Taking draft-thomson-gendispatch-no-expiry-03 forward

[Benjamin Kaduk <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2024 at 05:09:31PM -0500, John R Levine wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Jan 2024, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
> > > Unless the plan is to have the tombstone contain text from the authors
> > > explaining why they abandoned the draft (good luck with that), what
> > > advantage would that have over the datatracker saying the draft is inactive?
> > 
> > It makes it harder to jump directly to the text of the draft without having
> > seen the notation about the draft's status.  (That is, if you start just
> > from a draft name or a version-less link, you get the tombstone; you'd need
> > to go straight to a version-specific link to skip it.)
> 
> When I go to the URL with the draft name and no version, I see the
> datatracker page that says Expired in a couple of places and has an ugly
> orange box that says in bold face "This Internet-Draft is no longer active."
> 
> I'm trying to imagine a scenario where someone fails to understand what that
> means and instead needs to download a file that also says "It's dead, Jim."
> What am I missing?

In the circles I frequent, there's a decent number of links to the
html(ized) version of a draft, such as
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-kitten-gssapi-v3-guide-to
where "expired" is hiding in a sidebar that I (at least) have trained
myself to basically ignore.  The situation is more as you describe if I
were to go to the main datatracker page,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-kitten-gssapi-v3-guide-to/ .
So I think it rather depends on which "URL with the draft name and no
version" you are thinking of/visiting.

> I suppose if you rsync the I-D directory you only see the drafts, but I'd
> think the overlap between people who are motivated enough to set up rsync
> and those don't understand how to check for expired or inactive would be
> rather small.

Agreed.

-Ben