Re: guidelines section 3.7 (disposition of IANA MIB modules)

["C. M. Heard" <heard@pobox.com>]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Randy Presuhn wrote:
> P.S.  Being "superceded" does not transform "normative" text into
> "non-normative" text.  In the case of these pointers to the IANA site,
> they must be considered normative references, since they are
> an integral part of the specification and it won't "work" without them.

I agree with this last part, and it is probably a place where we
need to improve our practices.  Neither of the two RFCs that I've
cited as examples include the IANA pointers in the reference list.  
RFC 2863 does not have any URLs at all (it just mentioned that the
IANAifType-MIB is maintained by IANA) and RFC 2932 just mentioned in
the IANA Considerations section that the IANA-RTPROTO-MIB can be
found at http://www.iana.org/.  In the future, we should probably
insist on pointers to appropriate URLs being put into the list of
normative references, just as we do for all other modules that
appear in the IMPORTS statement.

> One important consequence of this is what references sections for
> dependent specifications should provide as their normative references:
> the IANA site or the RFC?

I'd say the IANA site.  In the case of RFC 2932 that would have been
the only possible choice.

//cmh