I am one of the people who would like to axe a lot of old and decrepit IETF standards.
Unfortunately, all of them have supporters who are really, really attached to them.
SSH has entirely replaced Telnet and FTP but there is no way those are going to be transitioned to HISTORIC any time soon, and that is just a status adjustment, not retiring the RFCs.
Did anyone ever use BEEP? Anyone want to spend time getting that status adjusted?
Internet Standards are protocols people use. The cure for people mistakenly believing obsolete cruft is a standard is to be less precious about declaring things Internet Standards.
Did we ever transition HTTP/1.1 to standard? It is what the Internet runs on and will continue to run on for decades to come.
On Wed, Dec 11, 2024 at 5:26 PM Nick Hilliard <nick@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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
