On 6/4/2016 11:42 AM, Barry Leiba wrote:
I just find it fascinating and disturbing that at least two respected
IETF participants think it's perfectly fine to leave stale references
around, especially when it's trivially easy to fix them -- in the vast
majority of cases taking but one sentence in the IANA Considerations.
I'm simply flabbergasted. This isn't "useless hoops"; it's simple and
sensible updates that rarely take any effort.
Consider that RFC6335 specifically limits changes to at least one IANA
registry to the assignee. IMO, that's the right answer for all
registries with assignees. If the ISOC/IETF are the assignee, then they
can do whatever they want.
Further, producing an updated RFC does not immediately update the
deployed codebase. It might be appropriate to include the new RFC too,
but not in all cases.
Case in point: TCP MD5. This was obsoleted by TCP-AO, but the TCP option
number for TCP MD5 should not be changed to point to AO. It might be
appropriate to add a note that this codepoint represents an obsoleted
protocol or even to point to the new one - or not. It depends on the
codepoint.
Overall, the point is that "it depends". Setting a single rule to
"update" is an algorithm. I repeat my previous advice:
"I'd prefer to trust the author to do the right thing that to engineer
this document with an algorithm."
Joe