The secretariat sent a note to ietf-announce this morning, which I mostly
consider a step forward - internet drafts will be aged out 185 days after
their original posting barring certain procedural caveats such as being on
a list waiting to be published.
I wonder what thoughts people have about this paragraph, though:
At 07:52 AM 1/14/2004, The IETF Secretariat wrote:
When an Internet-Draft expires, a "tombstone" file will be created that
includes the filename and version number of the Internet-Draft that has
expired. The filename of the tombstone file will be the same as that of
the expired Internet-Draft with the version number increased by one. If a
revised version of an expired Internet-Draft is submitted for posting,
then the revised version will replace the tombstone file and will receive
the same version number as that previously assigned to the tombstone
file. Tombstone files will never expire and will always be available for
reference unless they are replaced by updated versions of the subject
Internet-Drafts.
This affects me in two ways.
First, I maintain Cisco's internet draft and RFC mirrors. My procedure is
pretty simple. Every night, I run a process which
- obtains a list of the drafts/rfcs on the IETF server, via FTP
- creates a list of the drafts/rfcs on my mirror
- takes a diff between the 'ls' outputs
- downloads the new files via FTP
- deletes the ones that are no longer there
This has an interesting side-effect in our present (I suppose I should say
past) system: since an expired draft gets a tombstone file that lasts for
six months but does not change the name, the name remains on the IETF
server. Hence, in *my* mirror, an expired draft is still available until
the tombstone is removed six months later. For my purposes, that can be a
nice side-effect, although it is one I'm not stuck on.
If I can have two separate files (a tombstone and a subsequent new file
version) that have the same name, as described in the recent announcement,
I am going to have to figure out a trigger that will tell me that I need to
re-download the file.
Second, every 4 months we post ~700 IDs. Many of these are -00, meaning
"new name". Every ID that is posted eventually expires, which means that
according to the above procedure we are going to accumulate empty tombstone
files at a rate of perhaps 1000-2000 per year ad infinitum.
It seems to me that there is a better approach to the above, at least in
the context of the above. If the "tombstone" is literally as described, it
would be far more space/search/etc efficient for us to have the tombstone
consist of an added text line in a file indicating that the named draft
expired on a certain date, and keep separate files for the active internet
drafts. It seems to me that this makes it simpler to maintain a mirror and
to find temporary documents.
Thoughts?