Review for Historic

[Kurt D. Zeilenga]

At 04:22 AM 12/17/2002, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>actually if you search the Web carefully, you might find this URL:
>http://www.apps.ietf.org/maybe-historic.html

I'm quite aware of this effort... it demonstrates well how
hard we've made moving documents to Historic.

>Last modified: Sun Nov 28 09:59:00 2000 - I wrote the original version some years before that, I think.  After a while, I decided to find different windmills to tilt at; there's no shortage of them, and there's not enough energy to do the legwork AND fight the people who say "don't bother".

Yes.  Moving documents to Historic should be easy.  It's intended
to be done by an administrative mechanism.   Instead, we (the IETF)
made it quite hard to get a document moved to Historic.

But, what's the effect of this on the IETF and its customers?

Does keeping cruft on the standard track lessen the value of track?
If we place no value in track and status of our documents,
how can we possibly expect our customers to?

Does saying "don't bother" to those who want to remove cruft also
say "don't bother" to those want to further documents on the
standard track?

And what does it say about our ability to follow our practices?

I mean, why enact other administrative procedures (as proposed
in various solutions) when we are obviously unable to execute
the procedures we currently have?

Kurt