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Re: The Evils of Informational RFC's

2010-09-08 20:49:59
Please, no. 

The RFC Series is not a collection of standards. It is community memory, and in 
it we have white papers that have been seminal such as RFC 970, problem 
statements, requirements documents, and analyses of a wide variety, all of 
which are informational. 

Let me give you two specific examples:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2804.txt
2804 IETF Policy on Wiretapping. IAB, IESG. May 2000. (Format:
     TXT=18934 bytes) (Status: INFORMATIONAL)

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3924.txt
3924 Cisco Architecture for Lawful Intercept in IP Networks. F. Baker,
     B. Foster, C. Sharp. October 2004. (Format: TXT=40826 bytes) (Status:
     INFORMATIONAL)

The former gives a view on the topic of lawful interception, and requests that 
anyone that develops an interception technology publish it so that it can be 
reviewed openly within the community. The latter does exactly that.

The collected experience in the RFC series is at least as valuable as the 
protocol descriptions in it.

On Sep 9, 2010, at 12:03 AM, Eric Burger wrote:

Can we please, please, please kill Informational RFC's?  Pre-WWW, having 
publicly available documentation of hard-to-get proprietary protocols was 
certainly useful.  However, in today's environment of thousands of 
Internet-connected publication venues, why would we possibly ask ourselves to 
shoot ourselves in the foot by continuing the practice of Informational RFC 
publication?

On Sep 3, 2010, at 7:48 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:

With respect, Brian, I don't think this is simply the failure of journalists 
to discern the distinction between Informational RFCs and Standards Track 
RFCs. Nobody has made the claim that the IETF produced a standard for 
accounting and billing for QoS or anything else. Informational RFCs are a 
perfectly fine record of what certain people in the IETF community may be 
"envisioning" at a given time, as long as people understand that 
"envisioning" is not the same as "requiring," which is basic English 
literacy.
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