> Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 14:22:33 -0400
> From: Stephen Kent <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: An Internet Draft as reference material
>
> I want to second Bob Braden's pithy observation re I-Ds. If they
> make it through the process and become RFCs (including informational
> RFCs) then they clearly merit retention and they achieve it, since
> RFcs are archival.
See for example RFC 2549, "IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service".
I don't know if this was ever an Internet Draft, but it did make it
through the process.
> However, many I-Ds do not make it through the
> process and to archive them may seem to elevate them to a status that
> they have not merited. ...
I don't think that quality (whatever that is in this context) is necessarily
a monotonically increasing function within the working group and Internet
Draft process. A number of good ideas (documented in Internet Drafts) have
been dropped because of programmer whine ("That's not what I implemented",
"It's too hard", "It will take too long", ...), rather than lack of
obvious "quality". Not all Internet Drafts that never became RFCs were
bad ideas -- some of them are good ideas that, for any number of reasons,
never made it through the process.
I think the cure (destroying old documents) is probably worse than the
problem (people referencing obviously draft or unofficial documents).
-tjs
