The current status of the IETF documents: - personal draft - WG draft - standard Looks perfectly fine and reasonable. But I should accept that some engineers in Telco and especially Enterprises Do not understand these 3 levels because they do not participate in the IETF process. Hence, some vendors are capable of "selling" them WG or even personal draft as something equal to standard. I do not know what to do about it. By the way, cleaning old personal drafts would not help against this problem. Because vendors never sell something stale, for sure it would be the active and updated draft. Are you sure that you are discussing the right problem in this thread? Because a market understanding of the document status is important, Not the old documents availability. The more available - the better. Ed/ -----Original Message----- From: ietf [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John C Klensin Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2022 9:35 PM To: Gorman, Pierce <Pierce.Gorman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>; Scott Bradner <sob@xxxxxxxxx>; IETF <ietf@xxxxxxxx> Subject: RE: Backdoor standards? --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.
