Re: I-D Action: draft-wilde-updating-rfcs-00.txt

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Michael,
On 13/12/2016 10:31, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 
> Michael Richardson <[e-mail]> wrote:
>     > see inline. A great summary, just one nit which might be relevant:
> 
> I should add, having now read the document in question, which is remarkably
> short, if a been ironic:
> 
>    The obsoleted "Instructions to RFC Authors" [2] in Section 12
>    describe what "Updates" and "Obsoletes" mean.  These descriptions do
>    not appear in RFC 7322, and even if they did, they might still not
>    always be sufficient to understand the exact nature of the update.
> 
>    {RFC7322 obsoleted 2223, and 7322 doesn't include Updates or Obsoletes,
>    then it seems we've painted ourselves into a corner :-)}
> 
> but, my substantive comment is that we should obsolete the term "Updates"
> due to:
> 
>     Generally speaking, using "Updates" often has one of two possible
>     motivations: One is a bug fix ....
> 
>     The second motivation is that the updating RFC is a backwards
>     compatible extension, which means that strictly speaking, it does not
> 
> and instead use terms "Extends" and "Corrects".

I think this illustrates the dictum that "there is always a well-known
solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
[HL Mencken, 1917]. It's not that it wouldn't clarify the exact
status of certain RFCs - but it would hardly scratch the surface
of the underlying standards spaghetti.

IMHO, the problem tackled in
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-newtrk-repurposing-isd-04
is too complex to be fixed by simple measures.

It's also worth looking at this (out of date) example:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-newtrk-sample-isd-stdproc-00

Anybody up for newnewtrk?

    Brian

> 
> I'm unclear if there is a new required section "Reasons for updating"?
> 
> --
> Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>, Sandelman Software Works
>  -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-
> 
> 
>