Re: [rfc-i] "Obsoleting" a perfectly valid document

Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org> wrote:
    >> obsolete | ˌɑbsəˈlit |
    >> verb [with object] chiefly US
    >> cause (a product or idea) to be or become obsolete by replacing it with something new: “we’re trying to stimulate the business by obsoleting last year’s designs”.
    > [cited from New Oxford American Dictionary]

    > But the idea or the product are not obsolete, only the specification
    > has been revised after 5 years of experience with people using it.
    > People use RFC numbers both to refer to the actual RFC and to the
    > concept defined in there (as in “an RFC822 message”, of course usually
    > with the number of an obsoleted RFC…).

Agreed. I think that we need to obsolete the term "obsolete" and create three
or four more new terms.

    > My message was a request for help writing this up in a better way, but
    > also a repeat of my ceterum censeo that some of the language we use to
    > describe our processes is incomprehensible to outsiders.

    > Paul Hoffman has fixed up my proposed text a bit
    > (https://github.com/cbor-wg/CBORbis/pull/89), and with the support here
    > I think this can go in.  Still, I would like to hear about ways other
    > people have handled similar situations — it is quite tedious to extract
    > this kind of information from some 1140 RFCs that obsolete others.

I also like the text.

    > (Just to give one example: RFC 2822, which obsoleted RFC 822 and was
    > then obsoleted by RFC 5322, never says so except in the head of the
    > front page.  It also goes ahead and defines a whole section of
    > “obsolete syntax”, which retains some no longer desirable parts of RFC
    > 822 only to keep some measure of backward compatibility.  None of this
    > changed in RFC 5322.  Oh, and RFC 822 obsoletes RFC 733, but uses that
    > term again only in its front page head, and uses “revises” in the text
    > to describe the not insignificant technical changes that were made.)

So, in this case, the lack of outside-of-IETF awareness of the status of
RFC822 [the whole rfc++ debate] contributes to the fact that nobody worries
that RFC822/2822 are obsolete in favour of 5288.   I think that it helps the
technical people that the "822" is repeated, but we can't easily do this for
every document.

--
Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@sandelman.ca>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

Re: [rfc-i] "Obsoleting" a perfectly valid document

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