From: Eric Rosen <erosen(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
I see this exercise has already reached the point of absurdity.
How can it possibly be worth anyone's time to look at each telnet option and
determine whether it is deployed? What possible purpose could be achieved
by changing the standards status of some telnet option? Is there some
chance that someone is going to implement one of these by mistake somehow?
A similar comment applies to the FDDI MIB. Are we trying to make sure that
no one implements that MIB by mistake? Or that no one implements FDDI by
mistake, just because he thinks there's an IETF standard about it?
Let me echo Bob Braden's "if it's not broken, why break it?" query.
Spending time revising old RFCs of living protocols is unlikely to do
much good and has potential for plenty of harm. It's hard to avoid
the temptation to fix things (parts of RFC 1668 and RFC 1661 tempt
me), but such fix-it efforts usually produce incompatible protocols.
The IETF definition or RIPv1 was compatible only because it was a
strict subset of the real protocol. The IETF version of the printer
protocol was just plain broken.
Other targets of this exercise describe protocols that were never
implemented and should never have been allowed on the standards track.
Why not scale back the exercise to attack only obvioulsy dead or
stillborn protocols?
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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