On Thursday, June 24, 2010 22:01 Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
<snip/>
We currently have the idiotic position where RFC821 is a full standard and
RFC2821 which obsoletes it is not.
Why is this idiotic. RFC 821 needed to be obsoleted. It had some features that
needed to be removed, and some things that may have been appropriate in 1982,
but no longer so in 2001. "Proposed", "Draft" and "Full" refer to the maturity
of a standard, not to how well it fits the current Internet. One could argue
that 821 was very mature, because it needed a revision only after 19 years.
Just because the old standard needs replacing, does not automatically mean that
the new standard is just as mature as the old one.
It does, however mean that the distinction is meaningless to implementers. In
2001 or 2002 we would expect someone implementing SMTP to implement 2821, a
proposed standard, rather than 821, a full standard. While implementing a full
standard gives you more assurance about the quality of the spec, it doesn't
mean that "they" are not going to obsolete it ever.
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf