Just two observations by someone who is not at all involved in this. As others have observed recently in other contexts, one of the main distinctions that used to characterize the IETF and its work was that we focused on doing the right thing for the Internet, with flexibility to do The Right Thing in specific cases, rather than getting completely constipated by large collections of rigid rules, applied mindlessly. I favor being very careful about what we identify as Historic and about having traceability and easily-accessed information, but this discussion seems to be headed down the path toward "well, we made these rules that didn't allow for all of the cases, so we need to follow them without thinking". That doesn't seem desirable, especially if it represents a trend. I do see a special issue in this case: as I understand it, NSA has posted documents that are intended to replace some of the documents under discussion and has asked the ISE to publish them. If those documents were slated for publication in the IETF Stream, I assume the Right Thing to do would be to have them contain text obsoleting the earlier versions and eliminating any confusion. But they are not, which I presume is one of the reasons we are in this tangle. FWIW, would strongly encourage the IESG to take advantage of the considerable trust and flexibility the community has given it (and which has been taken advantage many times in the past when doing so has suited the IESG's convenience) to consider and cut through this knot rather than taking a position that sounds too much like "well, we made up this procedure, the community is stuck with it, and we think it is better to subject the entire community to the costs of an unnecessary Last Call than to figure out how to consider the facts of the situation". best, john-the-grump --On Tuesday, March 27, 2018 15:08 -0500 Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> > I was just looking at >> > https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current >> > /maillist.html, which does *not* show an IETF Last Call >> > being issued for "Reclassification of Suite B Documents to >> > Historic Status" (the status change document) until today. >> > So that seems to be the part that was missed last time. >> >> I do not believe that the additional month will yield any new >> information. > > I don't believe that anyone thinks it will. But, until the > IESG decides to revise > https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/designating-rfcs-as-histor > ic.html it is the process we are stuck with. (And given the > document load for the next couple telechats, I don't expect > the IESG to get around to deciding to revise this statement > before the four week LC is up...)
