Barry Leiba wrote:
This raises the question of what "expires" means.
At the least, if IDs are published publicly forever, then "expires" is no
longer meaningful and the entirety of that notion needs to be expunged
from the ID process.
You seem to think it means something like "expunged from the record, and no
longer available for viewing."
I think it means "no longer current for the purposes of work and
discussion."
I fully agree to the latter.
Expunging I-Ds that are older than 6 months looks like a silly idea
to me. Nothing in "Note Well" indicates that an IETF contribution
that is not published as RFC or regurgitated as a successor I-D
will be automatically un-contributed from the IETF.
Actually, to me the Note Well says just the opposite.
There are numerous I-Ds that are idle for > 6 month (even WG documents)
and there are also numerous abandoned I-Ds (WG documents and individual
submissions). I consider it perfectly reasonable to keep them as easily
accessible as IETF mailing list archives to the community so that
any existing contribution can be easily found and reused whenever
anyone feels like it.
I consider it a matter of self-evident courtesy to contact the original
author(s) before submitting a new I-D that incorporates elses I-D (or RFC),
independent of whether that document is active(I-D)/published(RFC) or
expired(I-D).
An expired or abandoned individual I-D might be an indicator that the
author(s) did not have the time/energy/endurance to carry it through
to RFC, not necessarily that the document (or technology described by it)
is not mature or does not exist. I expect that a number of expired I-Ds
describes an installed base that is alive and kicking.
-Martin