Visibility of current RFC Maturity Levels (and how they got there (was: Re: Last Call: Moving RFC 4405, RFC 4406, RFC 4407 (Sender-ID) to Historic)

[Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]>]

So, just to keep people at least sort of "in the loop" ...

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 7:55 AM, John R Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:

> When the status change document is published, the metadata for RFCs 4405,
>> 4406, and 4407 will point to the status change document, as you request
>> below.
>>
>
> The RFC production center has a database of documents that they use to
> produce the indexes and per-RFC web pages.  I know something about it
> because I added DOIs to it.  That database has slots for one RFC to
> obsolete or update another, which show up in those indexes and web pages.
> They don't point to the datatracker or arbitrary URLs.  One of the reasons
> we have tiny historicizing RFCs like 7805 and 7142 is to leave breadcrumbs
> to the RFCs that they affect.
>
> For that reason I have a lot of sympathy for Klensin's preference for a
> small RFC that contains the paragraph from the datatracker.  At a minimum,
> we should file an erratum on 6686 so it obsoletes 4405-4407 and that goes
> into the indexes and web pages.


Even as an AD starting his sixth year on the IESG, I didn't have a clear
picture of how visible maturity level changes are to the community, but I
have processed status change documents for some RFCs, so I went to look at
RFC 3540 (published at Experimental, but moved to Historic).

Just based on what I'd expect to get if I googled RFC3540,  I'd most likely
be looking at  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3540.

That page does reflect the current Maturity level (Historic), because it
inserts dynamic metadata at the top of the first page.

It doesn't say, on that page, how the RFC got to that Maturity level.

If I click on [Tracker], I get https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc3540/,
which DOES say "Status changed by
status-change-ecn-signaling-with-nonces-to-historic", with a link to
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/status-change-ecn-signaling-with-nonces-to-historic/
.

That's not great, but maybe not everyone needs to know how an RFC got to
its current Maturity level.

Of course, if I happen to be looking at
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3540.txt, I don't see any of this. The
invariant text form of the RFC would like me to believe it's still
Experimental. That's what you get from the datatracker, when you click on
"plain text".

Clicking on "TXT" on the HTML version from the tools page gets me a
different resource, https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3540.txt, but that
resource also says "Experimental".

I rarely go straight to the RFC Editor page (just because I spend almost
all my time on drafts that aren't RFCs yet), but if I searched for 3540 on
the RFC Editor page, I get
https://www.rfc-editor.org/search/rfc_search_detail.php?rfc=3540&pubstatus%5B%5D=Any&pub_date_type=any,
which says "Historic (changed from Experimental November 2017)", and if I
click on "November 2017", I get a pointer to
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/NPX38P5447i8DwYN7Ijf0t0JJEQ,
the IETF-Announce "Document Action: Robust Explicit Congestion Notification
(ECN) Signaling with Nonces to Historic" e-mail.

That e-mail does provide a link to the status change document (
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/status-change-ecn-signaling-with-nonces-to-historic/
).

I have opinions about all of this, and I shared them with the IESG and IAB
during our annual retreat last month, but wonder if anyone else does ...

Spencer