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Re: I-D ACTION:draft-sanz-rfc1032-historic-00.txt

2005-08-28 19:50:37


--On 28. august 2005 01:22 -0700 SM <sm(_at_)resistor(_dot_)net> wrote:

The reasons for moving RFC 1032 from status UNKNOWN to status HISTORIC
are light.  Such a move would have a negative impact on active usage as
RFC 3912 does not document the contact point for problems concerning a
domain.

Three thousand RFCs ago, RFCs were used for many things.
I recommend readeing some other "status UNKNOWN" perspectives, such as RFC 1003 ("Issues in defining an equations representation standard") or RFC 1019 ("Report of the Workshop on Environments for Computational Mathematics").

This particular RFC was (I think; people around at the time will correct me) brought out by SRI-NIC to make it easy for the early Internet users to get hold of its instructions; the IETF never had an opinion on it.

The IETF *is not in the business of* "document the contact point for problems concerning a domain". That duty is left to registry operators, who have a whole apparatus (ICANN) for making it possible to figure out how to do that. And they can ask to have such specs published as RFCs if they want to - it's been done before; examples include RFC 1875 ("UNINETT PCA Policy Statements"). But ICANN hasn't done that, so no policy related to any *current* domain administrator is on the record.

The only possible reason I can see for doing anything to the status of RFC 1032 is becaue the existence of the RFC is (wrongly) abused to try to force people into changing their behaviour with the argument "The IETF says so". Those people should stop taking the name of the IETF in vain.

Status UNKNOWN seems like a fine status to keep, in my opinion. Status INFORMATIONAL would have been more likely if anyone had bothered to reclassify the status UNKNOWN documents back in 1989 or therabouts, when those stop appearing. But like today, the people managing the publication series seem to have found better use for their time back then.

                           Harald

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