At 07:40 21-11-2013, John C Klensin wrote:
Neither 6410 nor, AFAIK, anything anything published since RFC
2926, addresses moving of a document to Historic, nor does it
provide the precise definition of Historic that (as Bob Braden
pointed out) we've never had, nor does it provide an alternate
mechanism for saying "use Not Recommended" other than publishing
an Applicability Statement.
The last RFC to be reclassified as Historic is RFC 2050. There is a
RFC which obsoletes RFC 2050. The last RFC requesting a
reclassification to Historic is RFC 6563. The document provides a
summary of the issues and attempts to explain why what the (proposed)
standard is no longer recommended. It has been the recent practice
to publish a RFC when a specification is not recommended or what the
IETF considers as harmful.
Obviously I, and perhaps some others, see "no longer necessary"
and "one of those situations" as more controversial than you do.
I may be alone in this, but I see formalizing information in the
datatracker as having the same level of archival and reference
permanence as a rather big step with some interesting
side-effects [1]. But it seems to me that, if you want to make
the change you apparently believe is obvious because the tools
have changed, then let's have that discussion and see if the
community reaches that conclusion... just as we did with what
became RFC 6410.
It has been said that the work of the IETF is done through its
mailing lists. The decisions are documented in RFCs. There has been
a few cases of inconsistences between what is in the datatracker and
the (email) messages the community might usually read. I don't
recall any formal discussion about formalize the information in the
datatracker as the archival record (the discussion in August was informal).
Regards,
S. Moonesamy