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Re: Expiring a publication - especially standards track documents which are abandoned

2011-09-05 20:05:47

I would note that progression to Internet Standard seems to have more to 
do with availability of interested folks to do the work and little to with
acceptance of the protocol. HTTP has been hanging at DS for many years and
that hasn't stopped its wide acceptance. Yes, there is now a WG working 
through extensive document improvements, but until that effort started,
HTTP work had been dormant for years. The IETF would have been laughed at
if we'd removed HTTP from standards track.

I see no reason to invoke bureaucratic wheel spinning to reclassify a
forgotten document. 

On Sun, 4 Sep 2011, Eric Burger wrote:

Why?  No one has cared about the annual review from 2026.  No one has 
time to do the bookkeeping and spend the effort to evaluate stuck 
documents.

If there is an RFC that is harmful, then one can always ask to have it 
moved to Historic.

On Sep 4, 2011, at 10:23 AM, todd glassey wrote:

There are any number of IETF RFC's which were published and then
accepted in the community under the proviso 'that they would become
IETF standards' which in many instances they do not. Further many of
them are abandoned in an uncompleted mode as standards efforts.

To that end I would like to propose the idea that any IETF RFC which
is submitted to the Standards Track which has sat unchanged in a
NON-STANDARD status for more than 3 years is struck down and removed
formally from the Standards Track because of failure to perform on the
continued commitment to evolve those standards.

Why this is necessary is that the IETF has become a tool of companies
which are trying to get specific IETF approval for their wares and
protocols - whether they are open in form or not. The IETF entered
into a contract with these people to establish their standard and
published those documents on the standards track so that they would be
completed.  Since they have not been completed as IETF Standards the
Project Managers for those submissions have formally breached their
contract to complete that process with both their WG members who
vetted those works as well as the rest of the IETF's relying parties.

As such it is reasonable to put a BURN DATE on any Standards Track
effort which has stalled or stopped dead in its tracks for years.

Todd Glassey
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