Subject: [IPsec] inconsistent RFC obsoletes/obsoleted reference

From: Paul Wouters <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2017 13:20:32 -0500 (EST)

See: 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7321

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8221

8221 states properly:

 	Obsoletes: 7321

but 7321 is missing:

 	Obsoleted by: 8221

Can someone fix that?

Paul

---

From: Tero Kivinen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2017 11:50:49 +0200

> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8221

See

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7321/

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8221/

and you can see that the information is already correct.

>  	Obsoletes: 7321

This is in the RFC text itself and this is the proper place to
indicate that this obsoleted something. 

>  	Obsoleted by: 8221

The actual RFC7321 cannot include text that it will be obseleted as
when it was published that was not known, and RFCs are not modified
after they are published.

The metadata header in the tools.ietf.org (the grey background block
in the beginning) can inclulde this information, but as tools.ietf.org
pages are not generated using the same database than what is used by
the datatracker, they can use old cached information that is not up to
date.

It most likely uses the rfc-index file to get that information, but I
do not know how often it pulls that version from the rfc editor and
how often it will recreate the html version of the rfc (RFCs do not
change so there is no point of generating the html version on the fly
for every request, so it will generate it every now and then and use
cached version then). 

> Can someone fix that?

Most likely someone can, but there is nothing I can do for this, as
fixing this most likely would require cleaning the cached entry for
the rfc7321 from the tools site, and regenerate html version after all
other cached information has already been updated.

Most likely this will get fixed by itself after few weeks or months or
so when the old cached data is replaced with new data.

Proper place to complain these things might be the
[email-masked] mailing list, but it is always better to check
things in the datatracker.ietf.org first and see if this is
tools.ietf.org related problem or whether there is real problem with
the source data...
-- 
[email-masked]

---

From: Paul Wouters <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2017 23:54:58 -0500 (EST)

> after they are published.

I was not talking about the RFC text, but about the navigational support
of the datatracker based renderings of our RFCs.

> so when the old cached data is replaced with new data.

That is not my experience. I have seen this for drafts going back years
and they only get fixed when I point it out directly to the tools person
or sometimes when I poke this list.

> tools.ietf.org related problem or whether there is real problem with

It would be good if someone could scrape the entire repository and check
it for consistency. I'm pretty sure these artifacts are very common, and
that bugs are still present. And it is more then esthetic. People assume
the pages don't lie about what is a latest version or that a document is
really not obsoleted by a new document when it doesn't say so.

If anyone has no Christmas project, this could be a nice time killer :)

Paul