I just love this mythology that "expires in 6 months"
means expunged from all retrievable record in 6 months.
nobody believes that, nor has anybody said they really want that.
just because IETF has a policy of not making I-Ds available after
6 months does not mean that IETF's goal is to suppress these
documents after that length of time, or ever. It just means
that IETF is removing the most widely known and most authoritative
source of an I-D after six months.
don't confuse the policy with the goal, they are not the same.
the relationship of the value of information according to the degree
of its exposure is rarely monotonic. specifically for internet drafts,
IETF's current policy makes the I-D series more valuable than it would
be if either I-Ds did not expire at all, or if they somehow disappeared
from existence.
Keith