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

[Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>]

I just find it fascinating and disturbing that at least two respected
IETF participants think it's perfectly fine to leave stale references
around, especially when it's trivially easy to fix them -- in the vast
majority of cases taking but one sentence in the IANA Considerations.
I'm simply flabbergasted.  This isn't "useless hoops"; it's simple and
sensible updates that rarely take any effort.

Barry

On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 8:13 PM, Stephen Farrell
<[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>
> On 04/06/16 00:35, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> 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".
>
> I don't get how that applies.
>
> Do we think there's a programmer who will start from IANA and
> not notice that there are references to 5322 and 2822? If
> there is such a peculiarly myopic programmer, their code will
> likely be crap anyway won't it?
>
> Or do we think there's a programmer who'll start from RFC822
> and not think "hey, this thing's 43 years old - I wonder did
> anything happen in the meantime?" ;-)
>
> And anyway the current facts are that folks will much more
> likely depend on stack overflow, not IANA, so the entire question
> of the best reference is pretty much close to moot.
>
> IMO the only reason any of this matters is when there's a subtle
> difference between the RFCyyyy and RFCxxxx versions of the same
> registered thing and where there's significantly improved text in
> RFCxxxx. In which case... we don't have a problem - RFCxxxx has
> solved it for us by definition.
>
> All that's to say that there is no need to, and only a downside
> to, forcing document authors to jump through more useless hoops.
>
> Cheers,
> S.
>