Standards Classification and Reality Problem Statement (was Re: Not a problem statement [ was Re: Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking)

[Kurt D. Zeilenga]

At 12:19 PM 12/16/2002, Fred Baker wrote:
>At 09:09 AM 12/16/2002 -0800, Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:
>>I suspect that if such reviews were actually done, not only would many documents be moved to Historic, but we'd see viable standardization efforts spring up to move the suitable documents forward.
>
>Lessee here. We took RIP V1 to Historic status a number of years ago. That means that all the vendors have removed it from their products, and every network in the world has upgraded to RIPv2, OSPF, IS-IS, or something else that supports CIDR.

Maybe to some... but not to me.  To me, it means the
RFC has been superceded, otherwise considered obsolete, or
is not considered useful enough by the community to warrant
further progression on the standards track.

>There is simply no market whatsoever for a protocol as problematic and deficient as RIP, right?

There certainly is a market for historic protocols.

My point is that lack of expired-in-grade reviews has removed
almost all incentive to revise documents as necessary to
produce a full standard.  So, its no wonder the Internet
runs on Proposed Standards.

While one might argue that moving many of the expired-in-grade
to Historic would lead to one of two things:
        a) an Internet running on Historic documents
        b) viable efforts to progress expired-in-grade
           documents to full standard.

If a, well, then I'd say the IETF is already historic.

Kurt