Re: Taking draft-thomson-gendispatch-no-expiry-03 forward

["Rob Wilton \(rwilton\)" <rwilton=40cisco.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Martin, Paul,

Thanks for bringing this draft.

I don’t have a great deal of issue with the expiry dates (i.e., I can live with them), but there are certainly drafts that end up sitting in an expired state but aren’t really expired.  I also think that within the IETF, all of us who are very familiar with the IETF process and how it works have less of an issue because we all know to go and check if there is a later revision, or ask the authors/chairs, or to ignore the fact that it says that it has expired when it hasn’t really.  But for folks outside the IETF, who don’t live and breathe our somewhat strange and opaque processes, it is a possible source of confusion.

Hence, I broadly agree with the authors that an expiry date on a draft is effectively meaningless information or potentially even misleading.  If I am looking at a particular version of a draft, and it states that it expires in 2 months, but there are already multiple updated revisions to that draft then the draft expiry date in the draft is header is just wrong and misleading, for all intents and purposes the draft has already expired and been replaced.

 

So, I agree with the broad aim of this draft of removing the expiring date from the draft and instead would prefer to rely on appropriate flags/notifications in datatracker to indicate how long since a draft was last updated, whether it could be stale, etc.  It is worth noting that datatracker already uses similar sort of notifications for tracking drafts through the publication workflow.

 

Datatracker already tells you if you are reading an old version of the draft.  It would presumably be fairly easy to have a similar warning that you are looking at an unadopted draft that is more than six months old and hence the draft may be out of date or abandoned by the authors. 

 

I think that we can replace the datatracker email notifying that a draft is about to expire with a similar email to indicate that it hasn’t been updated for over 6 months, or its status has changed.

 

Is the existing behaviour completely broken – probably not.  Is what you propose better – yes, I think so.  So, I’m basically in favour of changing this, and hey, if it turns out to be a mistake then we can always revert to the previous behaviour. 

Regards,
Rob

 

On 24/01/2024, 09:22, "ietf" <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

 

I was asked to AD sponsor draft-thomson-gendispatch-no-expiry-03, and am willing to do so.

 

Before I initiate a formal last-call, I'd like to do a substitute of a WGLC and ask interested IETF participants to give this a final read and indicate whether they are OK with seeing this go forward.

 

Please send feedback along those lines by Feb 4.

 

Thanks,

Lars