[ih] Why the six month draft expiration ?

[Craig Partridge]

More history if one wishes.

Internet-Drafts were initially called IDEAS and created at the Boulder
meeting in 1987 (see intro to those meeting proceedings).  IDEAS didn't
quite get off the ground and the notion was revised and the rules for
Internet-Drafts were announced at the UT-Austin meeting in 1989 (see the
Chair's message up front) and included the 6 month rule.

Craig



On Fri, Feb 2, 2024 at 12:06 PM Craig Partridge <craig at tereschau.net> wrote:

>
>
>>
>> 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
>
> --
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>


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