Re: RFC 4861 missing updated-by

[Mikael Abrahamsson <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, 10 Aug 2017, Suresh Krishnan wrote:

>  I had a short chat with Mikael about this during the Prague IETF. One 
> of the major issues I have encountered is that we do not, as a 
> community, have a common understanding of what the “Updates:” tag means 
> (or even what it is supposed to mean). Until that gets resolved, there 
> will be no clear indication on when to mark a document as updated and 
> when not to. As for this Erratum, I will hold onto it until we have a 
> better idea on how to proceed. As an example another document in this 
> category is RFC4191 that I personally think should update 
> RFC2461/RFC4861 because of changing the RA flag bits. Similarly, should 
> RFC4389 update RFC4861 for the same reason as well?

THanks for this. First time this was brought up was in november last year, 
when me and Erik Kline were notified that our proposed PIO-X bit was 
overlapping with the R bit.

https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ipv6/current/msg25491.html

I then raised this with the authors of 6275 without getting any meaningful 
response, I have raised it with multiple ADs as well.

I find that the current situation is very dangerous, and it needs to be 
resolved. I don't much care if we fix it by having an IANA registry for 
all fields in everything, or if we fix the updated-by references, or if we 
have "please also read"-reference, or if we just log erratum against RFCs 
that seem to have no updated-by but have more recent documents that change 
bits in them.

SOMETHING needs to happen. I wasn't told that there were things happening, 
that's why I wanted to "force the issue" by issuing an errata.

And by writing the above text, I realise that I agree with that 4861 
probably need to have some kind of "errata" against it as well, becuase 
the important part is that readers of 4861 finds 6275, not the other way 
around.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: [e-mail]