Re: [xml2rfc] referencing an old ID as expired

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

BTW, the proposal in
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-rfc-citation-recs-01
in 2011 was this:

   4.  A citation of an Internet-Draft should use the phrase "Working
       Draft" rather than "Work in Progress" whenever appropriate.
       (Stream-specific policies and practices might prohibit this
       practice within certain RFC document streams.)

but it was not accepted. The issue came up again in 2018:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-roach-id-cite-00
but no change was accepted.

Regards
   Brian

On 06-May-20 09:38, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> 
> 
> On 5/5/20 5:16 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>> On 2020-05-05, at 22:55, Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> On 06-May-20 08:05, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 5/5/20 3:35 PM, Paul Kyzivat wrote:
>>>>> On 5/5/20 11:12 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>>>>> On 05.05.2020 16:49, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>>>>>>> I want to reference an old ID for various reasons.  The ID is expired
>>>>>>> and no xml.  So I created my own ref section:
>>>>> I don't see much point in highlighting the fact that it is expired in
>>>>> the reference. *Any* time you reference a draft, even if it is active
>>>>> at the time you publish your document then it can eventually become
>>>>> expired. In some sense it remains a work in progress after it expires,
>>>>> it simply isn't making very much progress.
>>>>>
>>>>> And after a draft has expired you can still post a next version of it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Seems to be a distinction without a difference.
>>>> One draft had a feature which was later removed and never made it into
>>>> the rfc.  I wanted to reference the last draft with that feature for
>>>> discussion purposes.
>>> That's fine, but doesn't change the rule that I-Ds are cited as "work
>>> in progress", which is as old as the hills and has been re-asserted
>>> several times by the RFC Editor.
>> The place that cites the reference will need to provide the information whether the referenced draft is considered by the authors of the current draft to be
>>
>> * active [it might still be expired, because the update period increased to over 6 months, and it may expire while the current draft is sitting in the repo]
>> * abandoned (no successor)
>> * superseded (we try to capture this in the datatracker as “replaced”, but that is manual work, it also doesn’t quite cover all the ways of superseding a previous draft)
> 
> hmmm.  well one was abandoned; dropped by the wg but had ideas connected 
> to this work in progress.  The other was superseded; work continued with 
> this feature...
> 
> 
> 
>>
>> The bibliography entry itself is agnostic of this view (*).
>>
>> “Work in Progress” is a bit like “Proposed Standard”:
>> It means something very different in the IETF than outside in normal English.
>>
>>> I can't remember why, but I once needed to cite two different versions
>>> of the same I-D; that required some contortions in the xml, but they were
>>> certainly both listed as "work in progress".
>> Yeah, that is a misfeature of the bibxml library.  Easily worked around with kramdown-rfc.
>>
>> Grüße, Carsten
>>
>> (*) Ceterum censeo, not about the reference but about the place it appears in: It would really be useful to have a third category of references in RFCs that identifies *why* something is referenced, beyond normative and informative: historical.  But that is yet another dimension.  Yes, I know that historical can be lumped under informative, but this structure has more meaning to it than being used by the RFC editor to quarantine an RFC in the queue while its normative references aren’t done yet.
>>
>>> Stay well,
>>>
>>>     Brian
>>>
>>>> The other draft is dead and not going to restart.  However, it also
>>>> presented this feature and thus part of the feature discussion.
>>>>
>>>>
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> 
>