--On Sunday, December 29, 2024 22:02 John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote: > The other, which may be more practical and useful, suggests that we should include a statement in every new RFC that says something like "for up-to-date information about the status of this document, see..." and give a URL. If we needed to drive that point home (given recent debates, we probably do), we might also change "Category" at the top of every RFC to "Category at the time of publication" or even "Status at the time of publication" and include relevant STD or BCP numbers with that label. That would make it extremely clear that Category/Status information was _not_ a permanent property of that particular RFC. This seems like a reasonable place to start to avoid the problem growing ever larger. > That does not solve the problem for the 9000-odd existing documents but, once we got people used to the idea that "Category" at the top of an RFC was not the final word on the subject -- and where to look for that final word -- we could think better about ways to handle that backlog. For the backlog, would it be appropriate to assign existing RFCs wherever possible to working groups or at least areas? The objective would be to make the wgs / areas responsible for the maintenance of "their" part of the IETF library. Clearly this wouldn't work for everything but it might help to make a dent in the backlog by spreading the load across the community. We'd still need to agree labelling conventions etc but could leave the task of determining the status of each document to wg consensus, with the usual caveats of AD oversight etc. Andrew
