--On Thursday, January 13, 2022 17:38 +0000 "Gorman, Pierce"
<Pierce.Gorman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Also FWIW. Early adopters and independent adopters
> occasionally implement what is described in I-Ds and it can be
> helpful to have the I-Ds persist as a usable public reference
> (IMHO).
Yes. However...
(1) See my note to Ed.
(2) And sometimes, when they do that, the IETF decides to change
important details. That results in a new I-D and ultimately an
RFC for which implementations of an earlier version cannot
conform. Either the adopters accept that change, makes changes
to their implementations, and convince their users to accept
those changes or they don't. In the first case, the early
drafts become irrelevant. In the second, we end up with,
politely, a mess. At their worst, such messes involve arguments
that the IETF specs should reflect implementation realities even
if the IETF has determined that those implementation cause
serious risks to users or the Internet infrastructure (often
invoking the "running code" principle) and/or that particular
kinds of implementation are inherently more virtuous than others
and that the standard should follow them.
There are some other issues as well, but the primary reason for
all of the language about limited validity, references,
citations as work in progress [1] is precisely to avoid those
messes.
john
{1} See the "Status of This Memo" in any current Internet-Draft
as well as Statements and documents cited earlier.
