It seems to me that there is a better approach to the above, at least in the context of the above. If the "tombstone" is literally as described, it would be far more space/search/etc efficient for us to have the tombstone consist of an added text line in a file indicating that the named draft expired on a certain date, and keep separate files for the active internet drafts. It seems to me that this makes it simpler to maintain a mirror and to find temporary documents.
Thoughts?
This is probably orthogonal to mirroring issues, but it sometimes drives me mad when I have a draft filename but I can't find the draft itself and/or its status. Two things could help in this area:
- for all drafts, make it possible to determine the latest version - for inactive drafts, supply some reference to the author(s)
A good and simple way to do this would be to create a file that matches the draft filename without the version number (would this be that tombstone thingy you guys keep talking about?) and say something like "version 34 was submitted 2003-04-05" or "version 00 was deleted 1970-01-01" and copy the author's address section of the most recent version. Authors can then supply a link to the intended permanent resting place of the draft, if any, in this section.
If keeping all those files around is problematic, copying the author's address section into the I-D ACTION email message would also help a lot as the announcements mailinglist is well-archived.