[ih] Why the six month draft expiration ?

[Matt Mathis]

At the time there were several products that had been marketed and shipped
with InternetDraft compatibility as their specifications.    There was a
huge amount of worry in the IETF about IDs becoming pseudo standards, in
ways that might have ossified the IDs before they were done.

I recall some fixes:

   - Explicit draft lifetimes, slightly longer than the intervals between
   meetings (i.e. 6 months) to make it easy to identify docs that were not
   evolving on cadence;
   - Stronger language about the the scope of Internet-Drafts (the language
   about other organization issuing IDs came from this time);
   - and  the killer, the RFC Editor (Jon Postel) reordered the fields in
   one spec when it went to RFC.  I remember the change (moving the version
   field to the very front of the message) but not the protocol.   This of
   course busted all ID compatible implementations.

It would be an important artifact to find the RFC and corresponding ID.

Given that expired IDs never disappear, I see no reason to change ID
lifetimes.

Thanks,
--MM--
Evil is defined by mortals who think they know "The Truth" and use force to
apply it to others.
-------------------------------------------
Matt Mathis  (Email is best)
Home & mobile: 412-654-7529 please leave a message if you must call.



On Fri, Feb 2, 2024 at 10:16 AM Lyman Chapin via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>
>
> > 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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> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
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