Re: Another process question

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

Bert,

only pieces of history I've got:
when we reclassified RFC 1137 to Historic ("not only useless, but 
dangerous"), we sent out a Last Call and no companion RFC.

When I was Apps AD, I got one protocol reclassified from Proposed to 
Informational because it turned out that only one place in the world used 
it, and nobody else wanted to keep it on stds-track; again, a Last Call and 
no companion RFC. (I've tried to search my memory to remember the protocol 
name... but I've failed.... I think the user was Mark <something> at the 
University of California and the usage was something to do with libraries - 
but I can't reconstruct it)

The good thing is that the overhead of those decisions was low.
The bad thing is that five years down the road, I have no record I can find 
and point to saying "this is why we did it".

If we had put justification of such decisions in Protocol Action 
announcements, and had archived these permanently and searchably, I 
wouldn't see a need for a documentation RFC.

                     Harald, his opinion

--On 20. mars 2003 01:24 +0100 "Wijnen, Bert (Bert)" <bwijnen@lucent.com> 
wrote:

> We've been doing Informational RFCs to document
> why we reclassyfy some STD to Historic.
>
> Do we also require that if a WG wants to make
> a PS (that has been there for many years) HISTORIC?
> I understand we need to at least do a WG and then an
> IETF Last Call... but it seems kind of busy-work
> to also have to do an RFC to explain why...
>
> The explanation is that it has only been implemented by
> one vendor and that vendor's author is not sure they
> still use it (he will check).