Re: [Alldispatch] Taking draft-thomson-gendispatch-no-expiry-03 forward

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

Hi Rich,

 

Please see inline.

 

From: Salz, Rich <rsalz=40akamai.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, 26 January 2024 at 13:32
To: Rob Wilton (rwilton) <rwilton@xxxxxxxxx>, no-draft-expiry@xxxxxxxx <no-draft-expiry@xxxxxxxx>
Cc: ietf@xxxxxxxx <ietf@xxxxxxxx>, alldispatch@xxxxxxxx <alldispatch@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Alldispatch] Taking draft-thomson-gendispatch-no-expiry-03 forward

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similar warning that you are looking at an unadopted draft that is more than six months old and hence the draft may be out of date or abandoned by the authors. 

 

Do we only care about readers who know about the IETF datatracker and how to use it? Real question.

 

No, but I think that we really want to push people reading a draft to be aware of, and look at, the datatracker page for up-to-date information on the status of the draft.  E.g., the draft contains little information about what stage of the process it is at, and even the information that it does contain (e.g., the draft name) is not obvious/clear to those outside of IETF.  Hence, it may be helpful for the draft to also include a URL to the datatracker page for that draft.

But for those just looking at a downloaded draft, then the expiry date doesn’t really give useful/accurate information.  Certainly, it doesn’t reliably indicate whether they are looking at a current and valid version of the draft.  The publication date, which is always correct, is just as reliable as an indicator.

If we just look at github repos (hosting regular code) as a comparison.  They don’t have an expiry date on whether they are still valid, but I will certainly glance down to the last update stamps to see if it is a repository that is being actively updated or not.  If the code hasn’t been updated for a few years I might still be willing to try it but with the full knowledge that it might be stale and out of date.

Regards,

Rob