[Old-standards] Historic (Re: List of Old Standards to be retired)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On 17. desember 2004 10:21 -0500 William Allen Simpson 
<wsimpson at greendragon.com> wrote:

>> Marking the document historic does not take it "away" from deployment
>> -- marking document as historic doesn't hurt at all (except
>> procedurally, when used as a normative reference, but then we have to
>> do some work in any case if the reference was outdated).
>>
> This must be some new redefinition of the meaning of a Historic RFC.
> In the past, it meant "don't do it this way anymore, we no longer
> recommend it, there's another way to accomplish the same goal".
> So, for the PPP items listed, what's the better way to accomplish the
> same goal?

No, it's the old definition of Historic.

The definition "Historic = Bad" is a change that has been encouraged by the 
practice of not routinely making documents Historic.

This is, to my mind, no more sensible than the twisting of "Experimental = 
Kiss of Death" that was the vogue some years ago, which we seem to have 
successfully untwisted.

I think it makes sense for Historic to mean what RFC 2026 said it was.
And if it does not, we should explicitly decide to say otherwise.

                  Harald