Subject: [Rfcplusplus] downrefs and labeling

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2018 10:23:41 +0200

I don't have a strong opinion about whether to do this, but if we do
here is some food for thought around downrefs.

IETF standards occasionally normatively reference works that are
informational.  These are marked in the downref wiki.  Maybe that's
because even though those documents were marked informational, over the
course of time, they really turned out to be more than that.  We could
say that some of those informational documents are really de facto
standards, but that their marking in the downref wiki makes them de
jure.  If we consider this from a labeling perspective, it might be No
Big Deal.  But one might also want to reclassify such documents back to
RFCs when they hit the wiki.

Just some food for thought.

Eliot
**

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 14:52:33 +1200

> RFCs when they hit the wiki.

(Nit: it's no longer a wiki, it's in the datatracker)

Yes, that does indicate the benefit of having a single archival series
with consistent document identifiers. As soon as we hypothetically
deviated from that, we would create inconsistencies.

It's true that adding a document to the downref repository is a form
of promotion (following a Last Call) so it would be rational to
represent it in the document's external metadata. But we can't mess
with its archival ID; that would be a dataclasm. Things and their
attributes are different.

'When is it good sense to put "is" or "are" between two names?...
'When one is the Name of a Thing, and the other the Name of an
Attribute (for example, "these Pigs are pink"), since a Thing
cannot actually BE an Attribute.'
[The Game of Logic, Lewis Carroll, 1897]

RFC7292 is the name of a thing.
"Informational" is an attribute of the thing.
"IETF Stream" is an attribute of the thing.
"In downref registry" is an attribute of the thing.

RFC3174 is the name of a thing.
"Informational" is an attribute of the thing.
"Independent Stream" is an attribute of the thing.
"In downref registry" is an attribute of the thing.

I'm struggling to see a problem here, except that if
we disrupt the document ID mechanism, we create a problem.

    Brian

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From: "Andrew G. Malis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 10:37:56 -0400

+1.

Cheers,
Andy

On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 10:52 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
[email-masked]> wrote:

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