I think that is an excellent idea.
Of course, if we keep calling everything a RFC, I do not think this will have
any noticeable effect on either moving things forward or out.
For example, there would still be little incentive for people to do the hard
work of interoperability reports and (worse yet) finding out that they are not
fully interoperable. If we don't make things that are obsolete clearly
obsolete, the miscreants' marketing department will still be happy to say, "our
product Z is fully compliant with RFC XXXX"; most of the world will not know or
care the RFC XXXX was aged out.
The program works for I-D's, because I-D's disappear after six months.
People would have incentive to move things from PS to DS if, for example, RFC
XXXX becomes something like "OBS XXXX".
-----Original Message-----
From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand [mailto:harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no]
Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 2:42 AM
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Work effort? (Re: Proposed Standard and Perfection)
it's me again.....
--On 4. mars 2004 10:59 -0800 Eliot Lear <lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
We come to different conclusions here. My conclusion is
that no standard
should remain at proposed for more than 2 years unless it's revised.
Either it goes up, it goes away, or it gets revised and
goes around again.
I spent some time thinking about this comment from the
plenary on my way
home from Seoul. (An advantage of long flights....?)
I don't think obsoleting as a regular procedure is a bad
idea. But it will
take some work to get from here to there.
My musings came up with a guesstimate of 1/2 hour of work per
document on
the standards track that has been abandoned totally (due
dilligence in
figuring out that *nobody* is using it), and 4 hours of work
per document
on the standards track that is in use, but has no
particularly interesting
future and should be moved to informational - and a somewhat
larger figure
for the documents where there is in fact a reason to revive
and revise them.
Some calculations using very round numbers.....
We have approximately 992 Proposed documents, of which I
guesstimate that
about 800 documents are ready for evaluation under the 2-year
rule; if we
assume a 12:3:1 distribution of the three categories above,
we're looking
at around 600x0.5 + 150x4 = 900 man-hours to get there, if we
disregard the
part about the standards that deserve updating, and disregard
the documents
that have gotten to Draft and the full standards that deserve
honorable
retirement.
Possibly quite a bit less once the team doing it gets into
full swing, or
if there are many standards for which it is easy to show that no
usage/interest exists.
So if we can get 9 people to work at it, and want to be
up-to-date in a
year, we're looking at an investment of around 100 hours per
volunteer - or
about 2 hours each week for a year.
In the steady state (30 docs/month, currently), perhaps 30
man-hours/month
could be enough - lower, because since the docs are newer,
people who are
asked actually remember.....
That doesn't look too awful.... people who want to volunteer
for this work
can contact me, and we'll see if we can figure out a way to do it....
Harald