RJ Atkinson wrote:
At 15:44 22/09/00, Pete Loshin wrote:
IMO, it's not helpful to publish an RFC that points to a
"work-in-progress" as the source for explanatory or background
information about that RFC, if those documents disappear within months
of publication. It makes the RFCs less useful.
Do such RFCs actually exist ?
Do you have a specific example ? I don't know of any.
The last RFC I looked at, RFC 2917, has two (of four) references to
"work in progress". No, they don't reference specific I-Ds, but we all
know that "work in progress" is a code word for "some Internet-Draft"
and we all probably have no serious problem tracking down that "work in
progress" provided it hasn't expired.
I checked a few others, as well (don't recall exactly whichbut all from
the past couple of years) but about every other one had at least one
(and sometimes quite a few) references to "work in progress".
I have always heard that the RFC Editor will not publish
any document as an RFC if it tries to reference an Internet-Draft.
You can call an Internet-Draft a "work in progress" but it's still an
Internet-Draft. Calling it a "work in progress" just makes it that much
more work to track down.
We don't need to make the situation worse than it is.
Why would it be worse than it is? Because marketing people would be able
to point to an I-D that's more than half a year old?
An Internet-Draft that doesn't expire is much more useful to a lot of
people than one that disappears after 6 months. But not to marketing
people, who don't generally have such long attention spans, and are more
than likely working for another company by then.
-pl
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