Re: [Last-Call] Last Call: Moving RFC911 to Historic

[Donald Eastlake <[e-mail]>]

RFCs are immutable objects. I think of them as books on a shelf.
Mostly labels and categories are imposed on them for the convenience
of the IETF and other users of the documents. Early RFCs, unlike more
recent ones, generally did not have such labeling within the document.
But I have always thought that it would not be that hard to classify
almost all the "Unknown" status RFCs into our modern categories.
Trying to do this for all of them at once would be a large, perhaps
impractical task but doing it as convenient when early RFCs are
encountered or noticed doesn't seem so hard. It is fairly clear to me
that RFC 911 and similar documentation of specific implementations
should be labeled Informational while RFC 760 should be labeled
Standards Track. I don't see that the IETF deciding that some early
RFC should have some particular label for IETF purposes as interfering
with the authority of the RFC Editor. It's not like the early RFCs,
which are immutable, are actually being changed. The book on the shelf
remains the same.

I suppose this is somewhat orthogonal to whether RFC 911 should be
Historic and who should decide that. Probably for early enough RFCs,
that should be under the authority of the RFC Editor but I'm not sure
why the RFC Editor would want the burden and would probably be happy
to delegate it to the IETF.

Thanks,
Donald
===============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd
 2386 Panoramic Circle, Apopka, FL 32703 USA
 [e-mail]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 3:07 PM Brian E Carpenter
<[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Nick,
> On 22-Jan-22 07:25, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> > Donald Eastlake wrote on 21/01/2022 17:34:
> >> Why isn't the obsoleting of RFCs by later versions and the occasional
> >> declaration of an RFC as Historic sufficient pruning?
> >
> > if there are documents in the rfc library which are defunct, but neither
> > obsoleted nor declared historical, then there is an argument to say that
> > there's insufficient pruning.  Eyeballing rfc-index, there seems to be
> > quite a number of documents of this form.
>
> For example:
>
> 0760 DoD standard Internet Protocol. J. Postel. January 1980. (Format:
>       TXT, HTML) (Obsoletes IEN123) (Obsoleted by RFC0791) (Updated by
>       RFC0777) (Status: UNKNOWN) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC0760)
>
> That's IMNSHO exactly why we need a policy on this and a mechanism
> for detecting any cases that shouldn't simply be marked HISTORIC,
> and that's one reason why we need the new RFC Editor model that will
> be formally proposed Real Soon Now.
>
> I don't think we need to spend IESG time on this, however.
>
>     Brian