At 13:49 20-04-2012, Yoav Nir wrote:
No, I don't believe they are mislabeled, they just don't fit the
statement in RFC 2026, and they're not scientific experiments. It
gives fair warning to would-be implementers
Using draft-lear-lisp-nerd-09 (Experimental) as an exmaple:
"Given that there does not appear to be any effort to actually
implement this specification, does it make sense to publish it as
Experimental? It would seem that Informational would be a fine
way to document this approach. If I follow some of the arguments
that Pete and Ron have made recently, I would even support the
publication of this document as Historical"
BTW, that draft is better written than a (non-working group) draft
which is documented as having been reviewed by a working group or
material intended as Proposed Standard.
It has been said that the IETF runs on Proposed Standards. It is up
to the reader to assess whether authors give proper consideration to
the intended status of their draft. From the quoted text, a draft
could fit within Experimental, Informational or even
Historic. Whether there is a clear view of what each status is
supposed to mean is up to the jury to decide. One could read RFC
2606 or something else.
For example, 'moving a document to Historic status means that the
document is "not [an] Internet Standards in any sense'. Would
Informational or Experimental be considered as Internet Standards in any sense?
There is supposed to be less distributional conflict in the
production of Experimental or Informational documents. The main
point from the proposed statement [1] seems to be:
"the work may be abandoned through lack of interest or because
important lessons have been learned."
If "important lessons" have been learned, it is up to the authors to
see whether they would like to share them with the IETF. There are
informal ways and means within the IETF to make that happen.
The "lack of interest" sounds like establishing some kind of sunset
clause. Putting that in the document does not seem to work out
well. It would be easier to leave it to the authors to choose when
they want to be hanged and state that in the write-up. The reminders
could be automated, similar to what is currently being done for
I-Ds. There could be a 99 year upper limit as the person who coded
that feature may have restricted the limit to two digits.
The IESG has already expressed its expectations. As for the "Tidy up
after" [2], given that this proposed IESG statement is not a change
of process, it should be possible to move RFC 2345 to Historic
without the publication of an Informational RFC.
A long time ago a little girl asked her parents why all these names
were created for RFCs. She was told to read RFC 1310. That is not
really be the why.
Regards,
-sm
1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg72828.html
2. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg72852.html