Re: [rfc-i] I-D expiry [was Re: RFCs vs Standards]

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Brian E Carpenter  <[e-mail]> said:
>On 10-Dec-24 05:27, Eliot Lear wrote:
>> But it is, Joe.  The proof is that the ISE gets requests all the time from people saying that the need the RFC # in order to gain customer adoption.  That doesn't mean
>don't EVER get deployed but at least then we've done our due diligence.
>
>This does, however, suggests by analogy that allowing an I-D to satisfy a "Specification Required" IANA assignment policy is not acceptable. BCP 26 (RFC 8126) requires "a
>permanent and readily available public specification" which also implies due diligence. Every I-D states clearly that "It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
>reference material" which seems to make things very clear, with or without a mythical 6 months expiry.

That just seems perverse. If I took the I-D, snipped the boilerplate off the
top, and stuck it on some other random web server, as far as I know that satisfies
Specification Required.

We've had the problem of people thinking that I-Ds are RFCs and thinking that
every RFC is a standard for decades, and I am not aware of anything that has
helped. If we really wanted to fix it I suppose we could try to revamp our
publication process and stop calling things RFCs and instead call them
Standard-2024-123 or Info-2024-456 but that seems rather unlikely and we'd still
have 50 years of history to try to rewrite.

R's,
John