Re: Things that used to be clear (was Re: Evolving Documents (nee "Living Documents") side meeting at IETF105.)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 7/3/19 9:30 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

>> difficulties.    It used to be clear that you didn't deploy implementations
>> based on Proposed Standard, but people did anyway.
> When was that "clear"?

Probably I was thinking of RFC2026 section 4.1.1, last paragraph:

    Implementors should treat Proposed Standards as immature
    specifications.  It is desirable to implement them in order to gain
    experience and to validate, test, and clarify the specification.
    However, since the content of Proposed Standards may be changed if
    problems are found or better solutions are identified,/deploying implementations of such standards into a disruption-sensitive 
environment is not recommended./

But of course that's not stating it as strongly as I remembered, and the 
problem of deploying implementations based on Proposed Standard existed 
even before that.   I remember a flap about telnet implementations circa 
1992 in which implementations of a certain option didn't interoperate - 
one vendor followed the PS text and all of the others implemented it in 
the opposite way, and I heard a lot of people saying "they shouldn't 
have deployed at Proposed".

Keith