Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 14:22:33 -0400
From: Stephen Kent <kent(_at_)bbn(_dot_)com>
Subject: Re: An Internet Draft as reference material
I want to second Bob Braden's pithy observation re I-Ds. If they
make it through the process and become RFCs (including informational
RFCs) then they clearly merit retention and they achieve it, since
RFcs are archival.
See for example RFC 2549, "IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service".
I don't know if this was ever an Internet Draft, but it did make it
through the process.
However, many I-Ds do not make it through the
process and to archive them may seem to elevate them to a status that
they have not merited. ...
I don't think that quality (whatever that is in this context) is necessarily
a monotonically increasing function within the working group and Internet
Draft process. A number of good ideas (documented in Internet Drafts) have
been dropped because of programmer whine ("That's not what I implemented",
"It's too hard", "It will take too long", ...), rather than lack of
obvious "quality". Not all Internet Drafts that never became RFCs were
bad ideas -- some of them are good ideas that, for any number of reasons,
never made it through the process.
I think the cure (destroying old documents) is probably worse than the
problem (people referencing obviously draft or unofficial documents).
-tjs