Getting Rid of the Cruft: Report from an Experiment in Identifying and Reclassifying Obsolete Standards Documents
RFC 4450
Document | Type | RFC - Informational (March 2006; Errata) | |
---|---|---|---|
Authors | Eliot Lear , Harald Alvestrand | ||
Last updated | 2020-01-21 | ||
Stream | Internent Engineering Task Force (IETF) | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized (tools) htmlized with errata bibtex | ||
Stream | WG state | (None) | |
Document shepherd | No shepherd assigned | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 4450 (Informational) | |
Action Holders |
(None)
|
||
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | Brian Carpenter | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group E. Lear Request for Comments: 4450 Cisco Systems GmbH Category: Informational H. Alvestrand Cisco Systems March 2006 Getting Rid of the Cruft: Report from an Experiment in Identifying and Reclassifying Obsolete Standards Documents Status of This Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006). Abstract This memo documents an experiment to review and classify Proposed Standards as not reflecting documented practice within the world today. The results identify a set of documents that were marked as Proposed Standards that are now reclassified as Historic. Table of Contents 1. Introduction and History ........................................1 2. Bulk Decommissioning Procedure ..................................2 3. Input, Mailing list, Output, and Observations ...................2 4. Discussion ......................................................4 5. Next Steps ......................................................5 6. IANA Considerations .............................................6 7. Security Considerations .........................................6 8. Acknowledgements ................................................6 9. Normative References ............................................6 1. Introduction and History RFC 2026, and RFC 1602 before it, specified timelines for review of immature (draft or proposed) standards. The purpose of such review was to determine whether such documents should be advanced, retired, or developed further [1]. Lear & Alvestrand Informational [Page 1] RFC 4450 Cruft Removal March 2006 This procedure has never been followed in the history of the IETF. Since this procedure has not been followed, members of the community have suggested that the retiring of a document to Historic is a significant event, which should be justified carefully -- leading to the production of documents such as RFC 2556 (OSI Connectionless Transport Services on top of UDP Applicability Statement for Historic Status) and RFC 3166 (Request to Move RFC 1403 to Historic Status). Such documents require significant time and effort on the part of authors, area directors, and the RFC Editor. 2. Bulk Decommissioning Procedure From the Fall of 2004 through the Spring of 2005, the authors conducted an experiment to determine how many Proposed Standards could be considered obsolete. The experiment was operated as follows: o Identify a group of documents that are standards. o Assume by default that each document will be retired. o Create a mailing list for discussion with a policy of open access. o Allow any document to be removed from the list of those to be retired for virtually any reason, so long as a reason is provided. o Present the list to the working group, IETF, and IESG for review. o Revise list based on comments. o Write up results. The initial intent of the authors was to present a list of documents to be reclassified as Historic. The NEWTRK working group supported this view. The IESG, and the IETF as a community, makes the final decision. We will discuss this further below. 3. Input, Mailing list, Output, and Observations We started with our initial document set being all RFCs with numbers less than 2000 and a status of Proposed Standard. The input we used, starting November 25, 2004, can be found in Appendix A. There were some 125 documents in all. A mailing list, old-standards@alvestrand.no, was created to discuss and remove candidates from this list. A call for participation was issued to the IETF-Announce list on or around the November 15, 2004. There were 29 members of the mailing list. Approximately 244 messages were sent to the list. People were encouraged to consider the question of whether or not an implementer would either write a new implementation or maintain an existing one. Lear & Alvestrand Informational [Page 2] RFC 4450 Cruft Removal March 2006 After some months the list of documents to be considered was reduced considerably. This list was then forwarded to the IETF discussion list on December 16, 2004, and to the NEWTRK working group list for wider review. During review, RFCs 1518 and 1519 were removed, based on the fact that work is ongoing to revise them. Similarly, RFCs 1381, 1382,Show full document text