[ih] Why the six month draft expiration ?

[Craig Partridge]

>
>
> RFC 1310 is the original specification of the Internet standards process,
> and it includes the “six months” provision. As one of the authors of that
> RFC, I know that we wanted to prevent Internet Drafts from acquiring any
> status other than “ephemeral working document,” and a timer (with the clock
> re-starting for a new version of the draft) was part of that thinking from
> the beginning.
>
> As for the timeout value being six months, I suspect that someone in the
> room asked “what do you think the time limit should be?” and someone else
> said “how about six months?”
>
> - Lyman
>

Lyman's the likely expert here, but I do remember when Internet Drafts were
created and then discussion about this in the IESG when I was still on the
IESG (so before mid-1991 or so).  I seem to recall [and could be wrong],
that one reason 6 months was chosen was to ensure that a draft didn't time
out before at least one IETF meeting took place to discuss it.  While much
happened on mailing lists, we did have some processes that were driven by
face-to-face meetings.  If someone turned around a draft the week after
Meeting X, Meeting X+1 was 4-5 months in the future -- and rounding up to 6
months made sense.

Craig

-- 
*****
Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
mailing lists.