[ih] Why the six month draft expiration ?

[Lyman Chapin]

> On Feb 2, 2024, at 12:29 PM, John Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Over in the IETF we're having a robust debate about changing the way
> Internet Drafts do or do not expire, and in particular whether to let
> them stay active (for some definition of active) for more than six
> months.
> 
> RFC 2026 says this:
> 
>   An Internet-Draft that is published as an RFC, or that has remained
>   unchanged in the Internet-Drafts directory for more than six months
>   without being recommended by the IESG for publication as an RFC, is
>   simply removed from the Internet-Drafts directory. ...
> 
> Does anyone remember where the six months came from?  Was it some principle
> to keep things moving along, or maybe just if we keep them for more than
> six months we'll have to get a bigger disk?
> 
> READING COMPREHENSION TEST: We already have plenty of guesses, so we
> don't need any more. I'm asking if anyone was there at the time and
> remembers the actual reason.

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

> 
> R's,
> John
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