Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

At 15:34 +0000 9/20/00, Bob Braden wrote:
> The RFC series has long been THE archival series for the Internet.  To
> avoid Internet Drafts becoming another archival series, thus creating
> great confusion, the IETF has chosen to make Internet Draft ephemeral,
> timing out after 6 months.  Indeed, that is why they are called
> DRAFTS.
>
> The intent is that when good & useful information and ideas are
> published in Internet Drafts, they should become Informational RFCs if
> they merit preservation and referencing.
>
> A Working Group sometimes accumulates a froth of subsidiary drafts with
> information that is worth preserving, but ancilliary to the primary
> standards-track work of the group.  The chairs should take steps to
> turn these into Informational RFCs.  This was the case for the RSVP
> working group, for example; I know of at least once such "left-over"
> I-D that should have been published as Informational.  It did not
> happen because the working group chairs were tired; however, it was
> their failure in this case.  I expect that similar cases exist in other
> working groups.
I would have to agree with a number of other people who have replied 
to this email.  There does need to be an archive of I-Ds.   There are 
many I-Ds that were written several years ago that are still 
referenced often and pointed at.  I am thinking of several in the 
areas of addressing and routing that while they never lead to 
standards and some never were intended to provide a good piece of 
background or analysis of problems we have faced and the thinking 
that went into them.  (Often the answer isn't enough, new issues may 
require re-visiting why we went where we did.  For example, recently 
I wanted to find the old arguments from the ROAD process about how 
many addresses we need.  It was very difficult to find.  There are 
many similar examples.)
I-Ds are for the most part contributions to the process of creating a 
standard.  It would be inappropriate for most of them to be made even 
Informational RFCs.  While it may be worthwhile to retire I-Ds as 
active for a group's consideration after 6 months, it would be good 
if they were kept.  (Actually, I am surprised they are not. Generally 
they are kept as part of the paper trail in case some should sue that 
they were not given due consideration.  One can go to the paper trail 
to show that due consideration was given.  The email archive is one 
part of that but without the I-Ds they talk about it might not be 
sufficient.)
But overall, I believe that these are valuable to keep for historical 
reasons at the very least.  I have seen too many cases where people 
writing books have made up the history because it seemed reasonable 
rather than go dig through the sources.  It will be even worse if the 
sources don't exist.  (Then some day in the future someone will 
decide that we did this because there was something to hide!!!!   God 
forbid!)  There needs to be an I-D archive.
Frankly, the RFC space is overloaded to the point that it is very 
confusing to the uninitiated as to what the documents are, standards, 
some early ones are just observations, comments on documents, etc. 
It would much less confusing to the outside world if an RFC were just 
one thing.   Even ISO distinguishes Standards from Technical Reports, 
i..e. Informational RFCs or BCPs.
Take care,
John