Re: Last Call: <draft-leiba-cotton-iana-5226bis-12.txt> (Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs) to Best Current Practice

[Joe Touch <[e-mail]>]

On 6/3/2016 4:35 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 04/06/2016 08:50, Joe Touch wrote:
>> FWIW, IMO this is all make-work.
> Disagree. Misleading pointers on the IANA site will mislead some
> junior programmer sometime in the future, by a simple application
> of Murphy's law.
>
>> IANA pointers to the old doc should turn up "obsoleted by" notices. That
>> ought to be enough to trigger the user to follow the right path.
> That's not realistic. If IANA refers to RFC822, and the programmer has a
> copy of RFC822 on her disk, that's what she will follow, because RFC text
> never changes and does not say "I am obsolete".

If someone has a copy of IANA ports on their disk, no amount of updating
will fix the fact that it points to the wrong place.

We either expect people to use fresh information or not. Anyone who uses
RFCs should be accustomed to using the version that flags obsoleted docs.

Joe