--On Monday, December 30, 2024 15:14 +0000 Andrew Campling
<andrew.campling@419.consulting> wrote:
> --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.
Good. I suggest we see if we can get general agreement about that,
including getting the tooling done and the related changes made
before we dig into the older documents. I fear that, if we dig into
how to handle the latter, we will discover things to disagree about
and ratholes half-full of details and never move forward at all. At
the risk of violating my own advice, let me use you suggestion below
as an illustration.
>> 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.
Might be worth a try but I'd be concerned about at least three
things, both derived from the implications of almost all of us being
volunteers:
(i) As we have discovered with simply trying to get errata reports
reviewed and classified, "assigning" doesn't do much to actually get
things done even if it creates opportunities for acrimony and
finger-pointing.
(ii) Even if it did, prioritizing historical (sic) cleanups over
actually getting new/ contemporary work done might be a bad choice.
(iii) While some documents would be easy, properly classifying others
might result in time-consuming debates about cases whether and where
those old documents would still be relevant.
If we have to agree on how to handle the older documents in order to
move forward, we should consider borrowing from the decades-old
decision to assign everything of a certain age to "Unknown", taking
them out of that category only if new or ongoing work requires
examining or referencing them. For example, if work on a new
document requires referencing an old one, we might assign updating
the status and category information of all of its updated, obsoleted,
or otherwise superceded predecessors to the WG or Area responsible
for the new, in-progress one. That would be quite similar to your
suggestion but would involve only a tiny fraction of the set of
previous documents and would make assignments to parties who actually
had an incentive (not just an "assignment") to examine them.
john
