Historic status (was Another look at 6to4 (and other IPv6 transition issues))

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Noel and all,

The meaning of Historic has alway been a bit unclear. Neither 2026 nor its predecessors say enough about this category for RFCs; particularly, it fails to describe what are the procedures for moving RFCs to Historic, whether one is allowed to publish documents directly to Historic, what RFCs may be historicized etc. The current IESG statement clears up one of these issues, ie. how to move IETF Stream RFCs to Historic; but what does it actually means was limited to the following pieces of text from RFC 2026:

1)
    A specification that has been superseded by a more recent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.  (Purists have suggested that the
    word should be "Historical"; however, at this point the use of
    "Historic" is historical.)
2)
    A specification may have been superseded by a more recent
    Internet Standard, or have otherwise fallen into disuse or disfavor.
(not explicitly stated; may be deduced from the meaning that Historic is described)
3)
    Following each such review, the IESG
    shall approve termination or continuation of the development effort,
    at the same time the IESG shall decide to maintain the specification
    at the same maturity level or to move it to Historic status.
(from Section 6.2)
4)
    Once the new version has reached the
    Standard level, it will usually replace the previous version, which
    will be moved to Historic status.
5)
    In this case, or when it is felt for some other
    reason that an existing standards track specification should be
    retired, the IESG shall approve a change of status of the old
    specification(s) to Historic.
The cited extracts generally assume that Historic is mostly used to mark documents removed from Standards Track in order to denote that they are not Internet Standard at any maturity level any more and new implementations should not depend on Historic RFCs. Currently Historic is considered in a bit an other way (see below); eg. Experimental and Informational documents are also moved to Historic freely (see eg. RFC 6247), even though they have no relationship to Standards Track and it's fully up to the implementor to evaluate the protocol and decide whether to implement or not implement it (unlike Standards Track, which was intended as "IETF recommends to use this").

RFC 4844 does not mention clearly, but Historic documents may occasionally be published by IETF (I also saw 2 Historic RFCs published by IRTF and a number - by Independent Submissions Editor) directly. Procedures for moving non-IETF-stream RFCs to Historic are still unclear.

There were some proposals regarding Historic; eg. the NEWTRK WG document (http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-newtrk-cruft-00.txt), which is expired but was partly incorporated in IESG Statement on Historic (http://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/designating-rfcs-as-historic.html), and my proposal (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yevstifeyev-genarea-historic-03). None of them progressed further.

Some drafts registered by datatracker as "Internet Standards Process Rev. 4" (http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-lear-ietf-rfc2026bis-00.txt and http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-moonesamy-stds-process-00.txt) also say extremely little about Historic status compared with 2026. http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-carpenter-rfc2026-changes-02.txt, Section 3.12 proposed to change current Historic description to:
    A specification that has been superseded by a more recent
    specification or is for any other reason considered to be obsolete
    may be assigned to the "Historic" level by the IESG.  (Purists have
    suggested that the word should be "Historical"; however, at this
    point the use of "Historic" is historical.)
assuming that any RFC may be moved to Historic by IESG, overlooking other streams' authorities (this draft was issued in 2008, long after RFC 4844). This draft wasn't ultimately processed, even though it entered IESG review.

So what's the meaning of Historic? As Ronald mentioned, the formulation "to be obsolete" in RFC 2026 may be understood differently; one may think that it means "nobody uses the protocol", which is impossible to determine and then say for sure. The second person may think that "the protocol's possibilities may safely be provided by other protocol", which is easier to determine, but applying such definition might create problems with interoperability. The third opinion may be "the protocol is known to have technical/security/other omissions and its use should be discouraged". The others may also have other views on Historic, which does not facilitate the Internet Standards process.

And what could/should be done? I think, IESG and the whole community, cooperating with IAB, IRSG and ISE, should determine the definition of Historic which will be fine enough to cover all existing issues with it, and then either publish such approach as BCP or incorporate when updating RFC 2026. This will eliminate the problems with different issues with procedures for and understanding of Historic RFCs as well as clear up one of "dark places" in IETF process.

Of course, just my opinion.
Mykyta Yevstifeyev

18.07.2011 18:33, Noel Chiappa wrote:
     >  From: Ronald Bonica<rbonica@xxxxxxxxxxx>

     >  RFC 2026's very terse definition of HISTORIC. According to RFC 2026,
     >  "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." That's the entire definition.
     >  Anything more is read into it.
     >  ...
     >  A more likely interpretation is as follows:
     >  "the IETF is not likely to invest effort in the technology in the
     >  	future"
     >  "the IETF does not encourage (or discourage) new deployments of this
     >  	technology.

But in giving other interpretations, are you thereby not comitting the
exact error you call out above: "Anything more is read into it."?

To me, "Historic" has always (including pre-2026) meant just what the
orginal meaning of the word is (caveat - see below) - something that is
now likely only of interest to people who are looking into the history of
networking. (The dictionary definition is "Based on or concerned with
events in history".) I think "obsolete" is probably the best one-word
description (and note that 'obsolete' != 'obsolescent').

(Caveat: technically, it probably should have been 'historical', not
"historic" - "historic" actually means 'in the past, but very noteworthy',
e.g.  'CYCLADES was a historic networking design', so not every historical
protocol is historic.)

	Noel
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