On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Bob Braden wrote:
The IETF site is a mirror for the official RFC archive site, which
is maintained by the RFC Editor (and supported by ISOC). You will
find all 211 pages of RFC2178 at http://www.rfc-editor.org, or
directly from ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2178.txt
I had noticed differences between the files at the IETF site and other
sites before.
Specifically, the files at the ietf site ftp://ftp.ietf.org/rfc seem
to have a number of differences from the files at
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes.
I found 93 files with non-white space differences between these sites.
I only checked rfcs numbers 1000 or greater since the file naming
conventions between the sites differs for rfc numbers less than 1000.
Many of the .ps files were very different between the sites and I
didn't look at them any further.
After a quick look at the files, it looks like the files at
ftp.rfc-editor.org are "better". The differences are often editorial
in nature (spelling corrections, etc) although sometimes the
differences are larger.
Some examples:
- rfc1208.txt appears to be truncated at ftp.ietf.org.
- rfc1369.txt has different author contact information. I don't know
which is correct (if either).
- rfc1884.txt has a reference to "RFC 18XX" on the ietf site.
- rfc2002.txt appears to be missing some important text about the B,
F, H and D bits on the ietf site.
- rfc2025.txt claims to be Experimental on the ietf site while the
rfc-editor site has it claiming to be Standards Track.
- rfc2117.txt at the ietf site has a note in it that "This is
obsoleted by the new I-D <draft-ietf-idmr-pim-sm-specv2-00.txt>". The
rfc-index files should it obsoleted by rfc2362.
- rfc2157.txt appears to have some mime scribbling on it ("=" replaced
by "=3D" in numerous places. A few other files seem to have similar
problems where it looks like one process mime encoded the file and
another process either didn't mime decode it or did so incorrectly.
I would suggest the the hostmaster of the ietf web site should review
the differences between the sites and update the incorrect files.
Stuart
--
Stuart A Barkley email: stuartb(_at_)uu(_dot_)net
UUNET WorldCom phone: +1 703 886 5645
I've never been lost; I was once bewildered for three days, but never lost!
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