Subject: Labeling of standards: many proposed/draft standards are obsolete

From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 14:55:46 -0400

One difficulty of correctly representing RFCs by status is that the RFC
index is less than helpful in determining the status of an RFC. For
example, obsoleted RFCs are still marked as a Proposed Standard (e.g.,
RFC 1331) or even as a Draft Standard (RFC 1548). It would be helpful if
rfc-index.txt and STD 1 were to agree on status, as rfc-index.txt is
about the only non-manual way to generate listings of standards status,
e.g., for citations.

If a draft/proposed standard gets obsoleted, shouldn't it automatically
become historic? Or do RFCs that have been replaced get to keep their
medals like retired soldiers, with rfc-index.txt as their Memorial Day
parade?

This would seem to be in line with RFC 2026:

   A specification that has been superseded by a more recent
   specification or is for any other reason considered to be obsolete is
   assigned to the "Historic" level.

A bit of local housekeeping might make it more convincing when
castigating reporters and others...
-- 
Henning Schulzrinne   http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs

---

From: Scott Bradner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 18:52:52 -0400 (EDT)

Henning,
	the issue is that when an RFC is published the text is frozen
that is done so that all copies of that rfc are always up to date - if
the RFC were updated sometime along the way how would anyone who has
a archived copy of the RFC (or a CD for example) know that their
version is out of date?

Scott

-------