RJ Atkinson wrote:
>
> At 15:44 22/09/00, Pete Loshin wrote:
>
> >IMO, it's not helpful to publish an RFC that points to a
> >"work-in-progress" as the source for explanatory or background
> >information about that RFC, if those documents disappear within months
> >of publication. It makes the RFCs less useful.
>
> Do such RFCs actually exist ?
> Do you have a specific example ? I don't know of any.
The last RFC I looked at, RFC 2917, has two (of four) references to
"work in progress". No, they don't reference specific I-Ds, but we all
know that "work in progress" is a code word for "some Internet-Draft"
and we all probably have no serious problem tracking down that "work in
progress" provided it hasn't expired.
I checked a few others, as well (don't recall exactly whichbut all from
the past couple of years) but about every other one had at least one
(and sometimes quite a few) references to "work in progress".
> I have always heard that the RFC Editor will not publish
> any document as an RFC if it tries to reference an Internet-Draft.
You can call an Internet-Draft a "work in progress" but it's still an
Internet-Draft. Calling it a "work in progress" just makes it that much
more work to track down.
> We don't need to make the situation worse than it is.
Why would it be worse than it is? Because marketing people would be able
to point to an I-D that's more than half a year old?
An Internet-Draft that doesn't expire is much more useful to a lot of
people than one that disappears after 6 months. But not to marketing
people, who don't generally have such long attention spans, and are more
than likely working for another company by then.
-pl
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Loshin http://www.loshin.com |
| Internet-Standard.com http://Internet-Standard.com |
| The RFC Books Series http://www.loshin.com/bigbooks.html |
| The Linux Project http://www.thelinuxproject.com |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
