Candidates for Historic status

Moving to Historic

Once the IETF has published an RFC, that RFC effectively sticks around forever.

Sometimes, the stuff in a document describes something that we really don't want to recommend that people use any more, either because there's a better way, or because it turned out to be a bad idea.

In the IETF formal rules, this is accomplished by reassigning the documents to Historic status, and should be done if it is:

Obsoleted by another document with the same or higher standardization level (generally regarded as automatic) (RFC 2026 section 6.3)
Obsolete technology (RFC 2026 section 6.4)
Two years in Draft or Proposed, and no visible progress (RFC 2026 section 6.2)

Although it isn't mandatory, it may also be appropriate to move Experimental or Informational documents to Historic in some cases.

Candidates for Historic

The following RFCs that are more or less Applications area have been suggested as candidates for Historic. No formal Last Call on the question has been made, but the ADs would like to know if someone has a strong opinion on these.

RFC 934 (No standing): message encapsulation using dashes - obsoleted by MIME multipart
RFC 1153 (Experimental): digest format using strings of dashes - obsoleted by MIME multipart/digest. Current thinking is to not move on this before new MIME docs giving more guidance on how to use multipart/digest are made official.
RFC 1505 (Experimental): Encoding: header - obsoleted by MIME (this would also move RFC 1154, its predecessor)
RFC 1049 (Standard): the original Content-type: - obsoleted by MIME; shouldn't be dropped before MIME is Full Standard
RFC 952 (No standing): Host Table specification - replaced by DNS). (this obsoletes 810 and 608 too)

Formal candidates for Historic

The 24-month limit from RFC 2026 section 6.2 means at the moment (November 2000) anything earlier than RFC 2400 (published in September 1998) is a formal candidate for being moved off the standards track.

But those include a LOT of important protocols, so this document lists just a few:

Rather old Proposed standards that don't seem to be obsoleted by others (summary from RFC 1800) include:

977 Network News Transfer Protocol (status 2000/11/28: soon to be replaced by document produced by the NNPTEXT WG)
1274 The COSINE and Internet X.500 Schema
1276 Replication and Distributed Operations extensions to provide an Internet Directory using X.500
1277 Encoding Network Addresses to Support Operation Over Non-OSI Lower Layers (status Dec 95: new proposal has just arrived from the TOSI BOF)
1314 A File Format for the Exchange of Images in the Internet (effectively superceded by FAX WG documents)
1328 X.400 1988 to 1984 downgrading (updated by RFC 1495)
1413 Identification Protocol (IDENT)
1415 FTP-FTAM Gateway Specification
1648 Postmaster Convention in X.400 Operations

Also, the following have Draft status in the same kind of timerange:

954 Whois protocol
1288 Finger protocol (drafts by Zimmerman exist)

A separate problem is the issue of the Telnet options, which from RFC 1920 section 6.6 includes the following RFCs that may need to be moved to Historic:

Proposed: 698, 727, 735, 736, 779, 885, 927, 933, 946, 1041, 1043, 1053, 1073, 1079, 1091, 1096, 1372, 1572
Draft: 1184

If you have an interest in some protocol on this list, and don't know of ongoing work in the area, you MAY choose to consider this a call to arms.....

ned.freed@mrochek.org

Last modified: Sun Nov 28 09:59:00 2000