On Sep 8, 2012, at 13:02, Eric Burger <eburger-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Keeping I-D's around forever is incredibly important form a historical, technical, and legal perspective. They people understand how we work, think, and develop protocols (history). They help people what was tried and did or did not succeed (technology). And they provide a record of the state of the art at a particular point in time (legal). +1. I have used rfcdiff with drafts from the 90s, and that was very useful. I wonder why some people think "expired" means "purged from the face of the earth". Let's see: expire |ɪkˈspaɪ(ə)r| verb 1 [ no obj. ] (of a document, authorization, or agreement) cease to be valid, typically after a fixed period of time: the old contract had expired. See, I have this expired passport in front of me, and it is every bit as accessible to me as it was when it still was valid. I can pull it out of the drawer as much as I want, show it to my friends, etc. It is just expired. And there is no confusion whatsoever about that fact: It actually says so on page 3. Now about removing I-Ds from public view: This has no bearing whatsoever on how we express expiration. Drafts may need to be removed from view when they aren't expired yet. So there is no need to discuss expiration under this headline. Back to the actual subject: I believe the policy should be, exactly in these words: "Internet-Drafts will be removed from the archives only when this is really, really, necessary. The determination whether this is really, really, necessary lies with the IESG. The usual appeals process applies." Grüße, Carsten