Rob Sayre wrote on 11/12/2024 22:00:
I find the "expiration" (does not expire, it can just be on GitHub) policy to be something that concerns overly officious people.
The lack of expiration will cause the same overly officious people to claim than an ID has a level of official value which far exceeds what the IETF might think it deserves. The outcome will be that the default garbage collection mechanism for IDs that we have at the moment, however imperfect it might be, will disappear.
We've already built up a significant technical debt by not executing regular garbage collection on the RFC series. If we remove the concept of expiry as it currently applies to Internet Drafts, this problem will become much worse.
Creating technical fossils by design bothers me. Internet operations are changing to be much more process-driven. This is causing people to accept what's documented as being legit. I would argue that it's important to be able to point to a document with very little standing and say that it formally has very standing. Unless we keep the concept of default expiry, we lose this.
Nick
