We have enough real technical issues to deal with in
the IETF. It isn't constructive to create new non-technical
issues that we don't need to have, IMHO.
I do not much like the idea of establishing precedents that can come back to
hurt us - saying (as some have in this discussion) that its OK to make a
normative reference to an informational RFC as a principle is a very bad
precedent indeed - informational RFCs do not go through public review and
there is no way that all info RFCs are of the quality to be made mandatory
to accept in a standards track document.
People seem to be focusing on the specifics of the case at hand and ignoring
the fact that the words about normative references were put into rfc 2026 by
poisson for a very good reason.
Now there is a way to deal with the specific case at hand - if the reference
is to a RSA standard then the rules about referencing external documents
comes into play. if a copy of that doc happens to be published as an info
RFC to make it more available then that is still fine.
But I sure do not think it's a good idea to go down the road that many in
this discussion seem to want to go down
Scott