Hi John, Andrew,
At 08:49 AM 30-12-2024, John C Klensin wrote:
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
Yes.
the risk of violating my own advice, let me use you suggestion below
as an illustration.
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.
The errata report handling is a good illustration of the potential
issues. For what it is worth, the topic was recently discussed on
another mailing list.
(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or otherwise superceded predecessors to the WG or Area responsible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.
The "Unknown" classification might offer a workable path as it
side-steps the discussion of whether "Historic" is wrong.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
