Is it necessary to go through Standards Track to Get to Historic? (WAS: Appeal: Publication of draft-lyon-senderid-core-01 in conflict with referenced draft-schlitt-spf-classic-02)

["C. M. Heard" <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, 28 Aug 2005, Bruce Lilly wrote:
> The Historic category of published RFCs can be used for documents which
> specify a protocol or technology which is known to be harmful to the
> Internet.  However, RFC 2026 appears to have no provision for getting to
> Historic except via the Standards Track [...]

What makes you say that?  It sure isn't what I read from RFC 2026.  It
says this in Section 4.2.4:

   A specification that has been superseded by a more recent
   specification or is for any other reason considered to be obsolete is
   assigned to the "Historic" level.  (Purists have suggested that the
   word should be "Historical"; however, at this point the use of
   "Historic" is historical.)

Seems to me that the proviso "is for any other reason considered to be
obsolete" could reasonably be construed to cover the initial publication
of an obsolete specification.  It's certainly true that the most common
way to get to Historic is to start on the standards track and then get
retired, but I see nothing in RFC 2026 that says (or even implies) that
this is the only way.

//cmh


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