Subject: [Mobopts] [Fwd: [IRSG] id citations [was Re: review of <draft-irtf-mobopts-ro-enhancements-06.txt>]]

From: Rajeev Koodli <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 11:43:00 -0800

Subject: [IRSG] id citations [was Re: review of <draft-irtf-mobopts-ro-enhancements-06.txt>]
From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:35:05 -0800
List-Id: IRSG private list <irsg.mailman.isi.edu>

On Mar 27, 2006, at 2:34 PM, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:

> I have a more general observation I like to raise: I counted 29
> citations of Internet Drafts out of 62 citations in total, which means
> almost 47% of all citations are "work in progress". I checked up to
> reference 22 and it seems that 5 out of the 17 cited IDs among the
> first 22 references have already expired. How much should we be
> concerned about publishing an RFC which points to quite a bit of
> documents not really archived (in the sense that there is not a
> defined entity in charge of maintaining access to the cited
> documents)? This issue clearly has a wider scope and may require some
> discussion or a policy within the IRTF as a whole. I did not go back
> to the document to check what the purpose of those citations are, that
> is, whether the main optimization idea is sufficiently summarized in
> the mobopts draft under review so that the reference more serves as a
> way to give credits. In such cases, I would not see a problem. If,
> however, a reference is really needed to fully grasp a proposal, then
> having dangling pointers is kind of problematic.

Juergen-

My expectation is that many IRTF documents will cite drafts as IRTF  
work may draw on less mature activities in the IETF.  I don't see  
this as a problem although it's important that authors not assume the  
reader will be able to find these documents as they may expire or  
have title changes.

If the work truly relies on the other work in progress, the citation  
should be normative.  The RFC Editor will allow normative references  
in non-standards documents although authors should consider their use  
carefully as RFC publication will be delayed until all normative  
references are published.   (I've seen multi-year delays as a result  
of normative references in IETF documents.)  One way around this is  
to summarize the critical portion of the cited document and make the  
rest of the citation informative.

--aaron
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