Re: Last Call: <draft-leiba-cotton-iana-5226bis-12.txt> (Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs) to Best Current Practice

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On 05/06/2016 06:42, Barry Leiba wrote:
> I just find it fascinating and disturbing that at least two respected
> IETF participants think it's perfectly fine to leave stale references
> around, especially when it's trivially easy to fix them -- in the vast
> majority of cases taking but one sentence in the IANA Considerations.
> I'm simply flabbergasted.  This isn't "useless hoops"; it's simple and
> sensible updates that rarely take any effort.

Yes. I find stackoverflow as useful as anyone, but the people who provide
correct answers there ultimately depend on RFCs and the IANA registry, so the
latter just needs to be consistent with the former.

   Brian

> 
> Barry
> 
> On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 8:13 PM, Stephen Farrell
> <stephen.farrell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 04/06/16 00:35, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>> That's not realistic. If IANA refers to RFC822, and the programmer has a
>>> copy of RFC822 on her disk, that's what she will follow, because RFC text
>>> never changes and does not say "I am obsolete".
>>
>> I don't get how that applies.
>>
>> Do we think there's a programmer who will start from IANA and
>> not notice that there are references to 5322 and 2822? If
>> there is such a peculiarly myopic programmer, their code will
>> likely be crap anyway won't it?
>>
>> Or do we think there's a programmer who'll start from RFC822
>> and not think "hey, this thing's 43 years old - I wonder did
>> anything happen in the meantime?" ;-)
>>
>> And anyway the current facts are that folks will much more
>> likely depend on stack overflow, not IANA, so the entire question
>> of the best reference is pretty much close to moot.
>>
>> IMO the only reason any of this matters is when there's a subtle
>> difference between the RFCyyyy and RFCxxxx versions of the same
>> registered thing and where there's significantly improved text in
>> RFCxxxx. In which case... we don't have a problem - RFCxxxx has
>> solved it for us by definition.
>>
>> All that's to say that there is no need to, and only a downside
>> to, forcing document authors to jump through more useless hoops.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> S.
>>
> 




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