Re: Getting the latest version of an RFC specification

Yoav Nir <ynir.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> · Wed, 29 Mar 2017 16:40:31 -0500

On 29 Mar 2017, at 16:19, Matthew Kerwin <matthew@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 29 Mar 2017 21:52, "Dave Crocker" <dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
G'day.

The RFC labeling model is to assign a unique serial number to a static document.  A new version of a spec gets a new serial number. This basic model has the benefit of both simplicity and predictability.

To this we've added an overlay model, using Obsoletes/ObsoletedBy. This makes it dramatically easier to see that something has been obsoleted and to find its replacement.

However the seeing and the finding are an essentially manual process. One must go to the online older document, then notice the Obsoleted By tag and then click to follow it.

Sometimes it would be helpful for the requester to be able to say 'give me the latest' more easily.

So I'm wondering whether the IETF should consider adding a citation feature for this.

Something like:

     https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822/latest

would display the contents of:

     https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322

by having the fetching system automatically traversing the Obsoleted By links in RFC 822 and then RFC 2822.

Some sort of display banner would flag this, to help the user see that they are getting a different version than they cited.

Thoughts?

d/

-- 

Dave Crocker

Brandenburg InternetWorking

bbiw.net

It sounds good, for the most part, as a quick and dirty tool (though a 30x redirect would probably be better than displaying the ultimate RFC in-place.)

Out of malign curiosity, what would you expect from: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738/latest ?

That one is terribly wrong. Generic URL is obsoleted by the telnet URL and the Gopher URL?  And then, after being “obsoleted", it is still updated by three separate RFCs, the latest of which 12 years later?
But there are examples that are properly tagged.  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 is obsoleted by a series of six RFCs.

Yoav

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