On 1/21/2022 12:30 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
On 2022-01-21, at 17:38, Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
This seems like a lot of effort for no defined (or discernible) value to the RFC-reading community.
I’d like to hear the backstory from the original submitter…
Did RFC 911 pop up in an RFP and was hard to get rid of as a requirement?
Just speculating…
Grüße, Carsten
Carsten -
Quite a lot of the early RFC documents were either implicit or explicit
deliverables under various US Gov't contracts. In the current case, I
believe that NSF was funding the Berkeley 4.2 network implementations in
addition to the funding the author got from Telecom Austria, or that the
author was getting indirect funding via ISI-USC from ARPA or NSF. This
was simply a report of his work that could be published with minimal
effort and provide information for a community that cared. Sadly, that
no longer describes the RFC series.
These aren't "HISTORICAL" documents in the normal IETF meaning. This was
never an IETF document, nor did any documents created in the IETF depend
on it, or extend it. Some of the BGP work probably took note, but for
those purposes this is exactly the same as any external cite of a
published technical report in any channel say for instance an IEEE
document and we don't really treat those as special (e.g. downref).
We've got a few documents that were created prior to the IETF (e.g.
RFC791) on which we've hung IETF tags (i.e. STD 5) for our own purposes,
but RFC791 was originally created to document a DOD standard (and I
believe still does) so, while removing the STD 5 tag and applying to a
new document at some future time might be appropriate, declaring RFC791
HISTORIC would probably never be appropriate because, while it's an RFC,
it's not an IETF RFC. That's just one example.
Unless we've first hung one of our tags on the document indicating that
we are depending on it, we probably shouldn't be twiddling with those
documents not originated in the IETF process. Specifically, calling
this (RFC 911) document HISTORIC is a pretty arrogant arrogation of
authority over a document that was never an IETF(or IAB or IRTF)
document and never will be.
There are also a few RFCs published after the creation of the IETF that
are not IETF documents and we should leave them be as well, lest someone
claim that anything created after the Boulder IETF is under the IETF's
purview.
Later, Mike
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