[Last-Call] Re: Last Call: Moving RFCs 793, 1065, 1723 and 1725 to Historic

["touch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <touch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, all,

On Dec 17, 2024, at 9:43 PM, Carsten Bormann <cabo@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On 18. Dec 2024, at 03:04, Martin Thomson <mt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I've filed https://github.com/ietf-tools/datatracker/issues/8342 to maybe improve the presentation in places that more people look.

And because some people won’t follow that link, I’ll repeat here what I said there:

I don’t think TCP is obsolete.

We might be confusing making an RFC historic with designating a protocol historic.

RFC2026 confuses the two a bit here;

   A specification that has been superseded by a more recent
   specification or is for any other reason considered to be obsolete is
   assigned to the "Historic" level. …

The IESG statement from 2014 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/statement-iesg-iesg-statement-on-designating-rfcs-as-historic-20140720/) makes a different, more clear (but, because it’s just a statement, less binding) recommendation:

• A document is obsolete when there is a newer version that replaces it. RFC 821 is obsoleted by RFC 2821, which is, in turn, obsoleted by RFC 5321. The technology that RFC 821 describes — SMTP — is still current technology, but the documentation of it in RFC 821 is obsolete.
• A document is labelled Historic when what it describes is no longer considered current: no longer recommended for use.

For TCP, the IESG statement is again ambiguous - is 793 obsolete because TCP is still in use largely as described, or is it historic because that variant is rarely actually used because it lacks some widely used updates? Do the updated-by docs releive that issue?

Overall, I think we should be much more clear than either doc states. We should not be talking about documents, but rather protocols. A *protocol* has its RFC designated as historic when the protocol is, not when the document is. 

I.e., *again*, RFC2026 needs to be revised (and notably obsoleted, not moved to historic) when its process is updated (not completely replaced) by a new doc that focuses on the protocols, not the RFCs.

Joe

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