[Old-standards] welcome to old-standards

[Pekka Savola]

Thanks for bringing this up, because it's critical (IMHO) to gain some 
form common understanding on what we're actually trying to achieve 
here...

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
> "Echo for CLNP" may be gone (what would I know), but I'll bet you 3 
> packets that IP over X.25 is alive and kicking in some obscure 
> corner of the universe.

But this is exactly the point -- do we keep from de-crufting anything 
that is still deployed in some obscure part of the universe, even 
though standardization efforts ceased 10 years ago, producing new 
equipment ceased 5 years ago, etc. ?

IMHO that's a pretty important point to address, because I think about 
every spec we'd be about to something about is still in use somewhere, 
implemented in somewhere etc.

My argument is that possibly loose condititions for crufting something 
might be:
1) technology is just plain OLD and few care about it anymore
  - standardization efforts have ceased at least 5 years ago
  - nobody has done new deployments for at least 3-5 years, and nobody 
in the right mind would recommending doing them except as 
experimentation purposes
  - the primary deployment for the technology was done over 5-10+ years 
ago

2) technology was never in real use
  - it wasn't implemented except maybe as an experiment
  - it was never deployed (or no one has heard of experiments)

I think conditions 1) and 2) should also satisfy the criteria: "if 
someone showed that there is a big bug in the spec, would we care 
enough to fix that? -- if the answer is 'no', then it should be OK for 
crufting."

3) technology was simply designed badly, and it's dangerous to use
  - [some criteria]

This assumes that we'd have a big fat boilerplate saying like, "it's 
still OK to use these historic techniques, they're just so old and 
nobody is interested in them anymore, so don't expect any new specs on 
them!"

If we don't go down that route.. well, I'm not sure how much 
decrufting there is to do.  Obviously, we can discuss about the 
typical criteria for doing the decrufting.

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings