Keith Moore wrote:
it's really very simple: people posted I-Ds with the assurance that they
would be retired after six months. it's not reasonable for IETF to
violate that assurance without permission.
Errr, people post IDs to publicly accessible mailing lists which are
being archived onto the Internet. One consequence of this is that copies
of those drafts (and everything else posted to the mailing list) will
never leave the net. The question is how hard it is going to be for
folks to access them in the future, and whether it is useful for the
IETF as a whole to make sure that such access is simple for all.
What I think folks may reasonably assume is that any draft they post
will go out of scope after six months and not be in consideration for
working group study but it's unrealistic, and has been since about 1988,
to think that they you can arrange for them to disappear from the face
of the Internet and not be accessible after that period.
so if IETF wants to make old drafts publically available (and I agree
this could be a useful thing), it really should get permission from the
authors. or at least notify them and give authors the chance to say
"please do not make my old documents publically accessible".
If you really think this is practical, then you should contact the nices
folks at Google and ask them to take down the Usenet archives, and
perhaps look around at the various unofficial mailing archives that so
many folks run today. First time I went to the Google archive I found
postings I'd made in 1987 are still floating around. It never occured to
me that I could ask Google to stop sharing my misspent youth with the
world...
it would also be reasonable to allow authors to specify, when submitting
a new I-D, whether the draft should be made available after expiration.
Sorry, I don't see this as being reasonable *or* practical. If you work
in private groups to develop private standards this might be reasonable,
but the IETF works very hard to make their work publically accessible
and one consequence of that is that folks have to accept that entering
the process means everything you do is going to be "out there". Even if
the IETF didn't run such an archive of mailing lists, etc other folks
do, and have done so for a long time. All we're talking about here is
simplifying things...
- peterd
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Peter Deutsch pdeutsch(_at_)gydig(_dot_)com
Gydig Software
That's it for now. Remember to read chapter 11 on the
implications of quantum mechanic theory for time travel
and be prepared to have been here last week to discuss.
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