On Jun 26, 2010, at 12:56 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > The fact remains that RFC 821 has the STANDARD imprimatur and the better specification that was intended to replace it does not. Yes, but most of the RFC repositories, including http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821 show "Obsoleted by: 2821" right there at the top next to the word "STANDARD". Anyone looking at this RFC now (as opposed to 10 years ago) would immediately know that while this *was* a standard, it is now obsolete. This raises another question. What does "obsolete" mean? RFC 821 and RFC 2821 describe the same standard. Upgrading implementations to comply with RFC 2821 was not supposed to break any connectivity. They describe the same protocol, so unless you are interoperating with a peer that implemented some deprecated features, you're good. OTOH, looking at RFC 2409, it says that RFC 4306 obsoletes it. But RFC 2409 is IKEv1, while RFC 4306 is IKEv2. If you had upgraded an implementation to comply with RFC 4306 *instead of* RFC 2409 in 2005, you would not be able to finish an IKE exchange at all. If you need to implement IKEv1 (that is still much more widely used than IKEv2), the RFC to look at is 2409, not 4306. IMO this is a totally different meaning of "obsolete" > It seems pretty basic to me that when you declare a document Obsolete it should lose its STANDARD status. But under the current system that does not happen. It's true that under the current system RFCs never change. Even advancing them to a higher level gives them a different number. > This situation has gone on now for 15 years. Why would anyone bother to put time an effort into progressing documents along the three step track when most of the documents at the highest rank are actually obsolete? I don't think there's any incentive to do so. RFC 4478 has been at "Experimental" for 4 years, with at least 3 independent implementations. But when I thought it was time to advance it to PS, I was told (by an AD) "why bother?". It certainly didn't stop implementers from implementing it. Also, it seems that in the last 4 years, the IETF has published only 3 full standards, 18 draft standards, and 740 proposed standards. I think this tells us that there is very little incentive for advancing a standard. http://www.rfc-editor.org/std-index.html http://www.rfc-editor.org/fyi-index.html > What does STANDARD actually mean if the document it refers to is quite likely obsolete? _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf