From: RJ Atkinson <rja(_at_)inet(_dot_)org>
To: Melinda Shore <mshore(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
Cc: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2000 6:58 AM
Subject: Re: Topic drift Re: An Internet Draft as reference
material
The archival material is the RFC --*only*--.
Actually, it's not. It's whatever's archived.
I would not want my old drafty Internet-Drafts
to be kept archivally, just as others have indicated
they don't want theirs kept around. Drafts are
just that -- drafts -- hence not appropriate
archival material.
I really have no idea what Gertrude Stein would
think of her letters, notebooks, and random
unpublished scribblings ending up at Yale or
if Theo Van Gogh would approve of his sales
ledgers ending up in an art museum in Amsterdam.
At some level it doesn't really matter - you
can't always control what happens to the stuff
around you. In fact, you can't often control
what happens to it. It's difficult to predict
in what particular way material will be useful
in the future (the above two sets of archives
have proven to be *enormously* valuable for
contemporary scholars), and if someone wants to
preserve internet drafts for historical purposes, that
seems reasonable (and even desirable) to me.
Besides, someone has to continue to provide Peter
Salus with source material.
Please consider that internet drafts have revision
numbers. At some level we do value historical
process, even if it's as simple as this-version-is-
modified-from-that-version. We don't simply say
"this is the document NOW."
Melinda