On 14-jan-04, at 17:43, Fred Baker wrote:
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?
This is probably orthogonal to mirroring issues, but it sometimes
drives me mad when I have a draft filename but I can't find the draft
itself and/or its status. Two things could help in this area:
- for all drafts, make it possible to determine the latest version
- for inactive drafts, supply some reference to the author(s)
A good and simple way to do this would be to create a file that matches
the draft filename without the version number (would this be that
tombstone thingy you guys keep talking about?) and say something like
"version 34 was submitted 2003-04-05" or "version 00 was deleted
1970-01-01" and copy the author's address section of the most recent
version. Authors can then supply a link to the intended permanent
resting place of the draft, if any, in this section.
If keeping all those files around is problematic, copying the author's
address section into the I-D ACTION email message would also help a lot
as the announcements mailinglist is well-archived.