Subject: Proposed Elimination of Tombstone Files

From: IETF Secretariat <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 16:24:02 -0400

The IETF Chair is considering a proposal to eliminate tombstone 
files for Internet-Drafts that have expired, or that have been 
withdrawn or replaced.  If the proposal is approved, then 
tombstones would no longer be created for such documents, 
and existing tombstones would be deleted from the Internet-Drafts 
directory.  Please note that this proposal would *not* apply to 
tombstones that are created for Internet-Drafts when they are 
published as RFCs.

Before proceeding, the IETF Chair would like to determine if 
tombstones continue to be of value to the community, and if 
there is a compelling reason to retain them.  If you have an 
opinion on this issue and wish to contribute to the discussion, 
then please send your comments to [email-masked] by 
5:00 P.M. ET on Tuesday, May 31, 2005.

The IETF Secretariat

---

From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 14:03:34 -0700 (PDT)

Forgive me if I have this wrong, but my understanding of a tombstone file
is that it contains information which tells the reader what happened to
the original document, something along the lines of "this draft has
expired" or "this draft has been elevanted to RFC xxxx" In other words
the TEXT of the draft in question is replaced by a short pointer.

Given how often we find documents referred to through embedded URLs in
other text, I would imagine that tombstone files are extremely USEFUL and
should NOT be eliminated. I would think that getting the short pointer
text is a lot more meaningful than "file not found".

I also wonder why this rather important discussion is being referred to
a special mailbox rather than being discussed openly in the usual IETF
channels --- or did you just want all feedback collected in one place?

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher,  The Internet Protocol Journal
Academic Research and Technology Initiatives, Cisco Systems
Tel: +1 408-527-8972   GSM: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: [email-masked]  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj

On Tue, 17 May 2005, IETF Secretariat wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> IETF-Announce mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
>

---

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 23:30:14 -0400

I am not quite sure that I understand what this means...

Today, if an I-D named draft-foo-bar-03.txt expires, we remove it 
from the I-D directory and create a new file called 
draft-foo-bar-04.txt that contains an indication that the draft is 
expired, right?

A URL that points to draft-foo-bar-03.txt won't actually find the 
tombstone...   the browser will end up at the "document not 
found/might be expired" page, right?  You would have to know to look 
for a higher numbered file, the tombstone, to find out why the 
document is no longer there -- expiration, replacement, publicaion. 
Is that correct?

So what will happen after we elminate the tombstones?  Will there 
simply be no file named draft-foo-bar-XX.txt in the I-D repository? 
Will you still get the "document not found/might be expired" web 
page?  How could you then confirm whether the document expired, was 
superseded by another document and/or was published as an RFC?

Margaret

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 05:30:33 +0200

> text is a lot more meaningful than "file not found".

Tombstones essentially says "This draft has been deleted" or "This draft has
been replaced by ..."

This information is also available as a line in the all_id.txt file, and
I find it more appropriate to have it there than to clutter up the
internet-drafts repository with tombstones of deceased drafts.

As the years pass, if we keep tombstones, the ratio between number of
live drafts and tombstones will become smaller and smaller, and any tool
that works on the content of the draft repository (or mirrors of it) will
have to sort through an ever-increasing amount of chaff.

If the only thing we want the tombstones for is to get a better message
than "file not found" when accessing the online internet-drafts repository
with a browser, that function can easily be provided by an http error
handler script which looks up the requested draft name in the all_id.txt
file and returns the status of the draft (expired, replaced by ..., 
published as RFC xxxx) instead of "file not found".

	Henrik

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 15:30:03 +0900

>published as RFC xxxx) instead of "file not found".

I fully agree with Henrik that a http-based solution is much better.
Whether tha all_id.txt file is used directly or not is a detail.
If this gets done, it would be great if at the same time, the same
solution could also take care of pointers from older draft URIs to
newer versions, either via an intermediate page
(saying something like "draft-fluffy-foo-bar-05.txt is no longer
available, the newest version of this document is
draft-fluffy-foo-bar-08.txt") or simply by directly linking to
the newest draft.

This would be a very easy way of helping IETF newcommers
understand what's going on.

Regards,    Martin.

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 08:54:33 +0200

> understand what's going on.

I like it.  I've already put together something similar in order to have
a way to provide stable links to the latest version of drafts, and extending
it to provide both functions mentioned above would be trivial.

The current version is available here: 

  http://tools.ietf.org/id/

- I'll see if I can update it to match the functions mentioned above during
the day today.

	Henrik

---

From: Geoff Huston <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 21:07:30 +1000

>   http://tools.ietf.org/id/

And a little bit of work with php can embed the generic draft name into the URL

e.g. http://draft-ietf-grow-anycast.potaroo.net

Geoff

---

From: "Olaf M. Kolkman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 14:55:37 +0200

The URL rewriting would work for me but remember not all people use the IETF http server to
pull their I-Ds. Some of us still use ftp mirrors to fetch the information and there may be 
references to say ftp://ftp.ripe.net/internet-drafts/draft-foo-bar.txt.

-- Olaf

---------------------------------| Olaf M. Kolkman
---------------------------------| RIPE NCC
---------------------------------| JID: olaf at jabber.secret-wg.org

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 16:30:59 +0200

> references to say ftp://ftp.ripe.net/internet-drafts/draft-foo-bar.txt.

True.  But ftp and rsync mirrors should also contain the all_id.txt file,
which lives in the same directory as the drafts.  And expired drafts will
break links to the mirror repositories too - I'm not sure having the 
tombstones is a better solution than looking up the draft in the all_id.txt
file ...

	Henrik

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 08:24:13 -0700

>draft-foo-bar-04.txt that contains an indication that the draft is 

Right. And, if the author later revives the document, sometimes the 
new draft appears as -04, sometimes as -05, depending on the 
Secretariat's process that month.

Consistency would be better, and a no-tombstone policy would help 
with consistency, particularly when mixed with Henrik's tool for 
finding the current state of a draft without its -xx.txt.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 10:56:43 -0700

Hi -

> From: "Henrik Levkowetz" <[email-masked]>
> To: "Olaf M. Kolkman" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 7:30 AM
> Subject: Re: Proposed Elimination of Tombstone Files
...
> tombstones is a better solution than looking up the draft in the all_id.txt
...

Since it's been mentioned several times, I'd love to know where  this
"all_id.txt" file is documented.  I haven't seen any links to it in the
www.ietf.org website, but I could have missed it.

Randy

---

From: Rohan Mahy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 10:59:09 -0700

I support the removal of the tombstones files.  Information about 
expired drafts is better provided in the machine-readable all_id.txt 
file.  The current tombstones are a nuisance for maintaining archives 
of expired and unexpired drafts alike.

thanks,
-rohan

---

From: Henk Uijterwaal <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 21:56:32 +0200

>>withdrawn or replaced.

What I'm missing in this whole discussion is an argument why the
tombstone files should be removed.

In first order, I'd think that creating a tombstone is very little
work.  When a draft is removed, the ID editor will have to take some
action, creating a tombstone from some standard template should not
be too much work.  Storing them takes a few bytes on a disk and that
is a matter of a few cents these days.  I could be wrong here, but
then I'd like to know.

We keep records of our discussions (mailing lists, minutes, etc).
In these records, we refer to drafts.   If we consider keeping
records of the discussion useful, then we should also keep some
records of the document that we discussed.  With the tombstone,
a person trying to read up on a topic, will at least be able to find
out what happened to the document.  Yes, an old mail might refer to
draft-foo-XX.txt and XX might have been increased by the time one
reads the mail, but at least the document is there and can easily
be found.  Without the tombstone, the person will be in the dark
as to what happened to the document.

Of course, the number of people hitting the tombstone will decrease over
time, so there might be some advantage to removing them after a few years.
However, I wonder if this does not create more work than simply leaving
them there.

Henk

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---

From: Rohan Mahy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 13:52:55 -0700

> tombstone files should be removed.

1) They should be removed because many people consider them a nuisance.
a) For example, if I want to see all the active draft being discussed  
relevant to the foobar WG, I should be able to do a directory listing  
and get all the active drafts or those replaced by an RFC.  The  
tombstones create a lot of clutter which I need to wade through.

b) When a draft expires (say an -03), an -04 tombstone is created.   
When a real -04 version is later created this creates confusion.  The  
tombstones interfere with the straightforward ability to maintain an  
automated mirror of *actual* internet drafts.

c) They are not consistent enough to be easily and reliably machine  
readable

2) They are safe to remove because they are redundant.
a) They duplicate information already provided in the all_id.txt file  
(which is machine readable).

b) The function of finding the most recent version of a file or finding  
out what happened to ID <foo> can be more efficiently using automated  
tools (which use the all_id.txt file) to automatically display the most  
recent rev of "draft-ietf-foo-bar", or show a page explaining that  
draft-person-wg-xyz-considered-evil-02 has expired, but provides a link  
to the most recent draft which is  
draft-ietf-wg-xyz-considered-harmful-04.  Note that this example would  
have required a human to visit a series of tombstones which may or may  
not have lead to the correct place.

thx,
-rohan

> out what happened to the document.

they can do that more effectively using the all_id.txt file.

> Yes, an old mail might refer to

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 17:17:21 +0200

Maybe someone else answered, since I am behind on this thread,
but the I-D database tells you this (and at least for drafts
I wrote back to 1994, seems to be complete).

https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/idindex.cgi

    Brian

Margaret Wasserman wrote:
> Today, if an I-D named draft-foo-bar-03.txt expires, we remove it from 
> the I-D directory and create a new file called draft-foo-bar-04.txt that 
> contains an indication that the draft is expired, right?
> 
> tombstone...   the browser will end up at the "document not found/might 
> be expired" page, right?  You would have to know to look for a higher 
> numbered file, the tombstone, to find out why the document is no longer 
> there -- expiration, replacement, publicaion. Is that correct?
> 
> So what will happen after we elminate the tombstones?  Will there simply 
> be no file named draft-foo-bar-XX.txt in the I-D repository? Will you 
> still get the "document not found/might be expired" web page?  How could 
> you then confirm whether the document expired, was superseded by another 
> document and/or was published as an RFC?
> 
> Margaret
>

---

From: Henk Uijterwaal <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 18:51:41 +0200

>1) They should be removed because many people consider them a nuisance.

I would consider it a nuisance if there is no easy way to find out
what happened to drafts that were discussed in the past.

>automated mirror of *actual* internet drafts.

If this is an issue, then simply call the revived draft -05.  -03 was
active, it expired and 04 says so, shows the new version.  If you want
to purge files, remove everything up to 04.

>c) They are not consistent enough to be easily and reliably machine

Last time I checked, I was still a human.  For humans, the all_id.txt
file is hard to process for humans.  YMMV.

>2) They are safe to remove because they are redundant.

If this was an argument, then the all_id.txt file can be removed as
well.  ID's are announced in a standard format on the mailing list,
these mails can easily be fed into a tool and parsed there.

Henk

---

From: Rohan Mahy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 16:16:47 -0700

> what happened to drafts that were discussed in the past.

good.  there will be, and it will be considerably more convenient for 
most humans than a text tombstone file.

> to purge files, remove everything up to 04.

Unfortunately the way tombstones have been created in the past was 
inconsistent, and there is no consensus that it is either good to have 
non-sequential draft sequence numbers, or tombstones that get replaced 
in place by real drafts.

> file is hard to process for humans.  YMMV.

1) Fortunately, every editor and text viewer I am aware of has a 
"search" or "find" feature which will happily search the all_id.txt 
file.
2) If you are connected to the network you will soon be able to use a 
tool that Henrik has promissed us.
3) If you are fortunate enough to have access to grep or one of its 
variants, you can trivially find an expired draft that way as well.

rohan% grep "sip-identity" all_id.txt
draft-ietf-sip-identity-04      2005-02-16      Active
draft-peterson-sip-identity-01  2002-07-05      Replaced replaced by 
draft-ietf-sip-identity

> these mails can easily be fed into a tool and parsed there.

Your suggestion would only work for those who had subscribed to 
ID-announce since *before* the draft(s) of interest were announced, and 
who had never missed an ID-announce message due to email problems.
In addition, I disagree that the format of the announcement is "easy to 
parse". If *you* find them easy to parse these, then please stop 
whining about the tombstones and go parse the announcements yourself.

thanks,
-rohan

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 14:29:07 +0200

...
> I also wonder why this rather important discussion

That's a matter of opinion, I think.

> is being referred to

Exactly

    Brian

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 15:26:40 +0200

As I read the responses that have reached me by various
channels, but mainly on the wgchairs list, there are approximately equal
numbers of people pleading to keep tombstones (8), to eliminate them (7),
and to do something in between (7).

> what happened to drafts that were discussed in the past.

That's a requirement that I see in most if not all of the responses
saying "keep them" and I think it is absolutely reasonable, as a
requirement. As far as I can see, it is largely met by
https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/idindex.cgi?command=search_id
It knows about drafts back to 1992 or so. Search for
draft-ietf-mpls-bundle-mib to see one that was replaced
by a draft with a different name.

On the other hand, I see that most people who say "remove them"
also have a very strong argument: spam-like pollution of their
I-D mirror directories. As Fred said:

 > Out of a total of 12994 files, I see 1886 currently useful files.

To those who have asked for expired I-Ds to be archived and visible,
I have to quote RFC 2026:

    An Internet-Draft that is published as an RFC, or that has remained
    unchanged in the Internet-Drafts directory for more than six months
    without being recommended by the IESG for publication as an RFC, is
    simply removed from the Internet-Drafts directory.  At any time, an
    Internet-Draft may be replaced by a more recent version of the same
    specification, restarting the six-month timeout period.

    An Internet-Draft is NOT a means of "publishing" a specification;
    specifications are published through the RFC mechanism described in
    the previous section.  Internet-Drafts have no formal status, and are
    subject to change or removal at any time.

       ********************************************************
       *                                                      *
       *   Under no circumstances should an Internet-Draft    *
       *   be referenced by any paper, report, or Request-    *
       *   for-Proposal, nor should a vendor claim compliance *
       *   with an Internet-Draft.                            *
       *                                                      *
       ********************************************************

This has always been taken to mean that the standards process
*requires* old I-Ds to be removed from public view on the IETF's
servers.

To officialize the tool that Henrik is working on, we'll first
have to decide whether it violates RFC 2026 (possibly an
issue for newtrk). But unless people give me a convincing
argument why the the above search tool isn't better than
10000 junk files, I will instruct the secretariat to phase out
the tombstones.

      Brian

---

From: Henk Uijterwaal <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 15:56:37 +0200

This is in RFC2026.  However, in the ID boiler plate, it says:

   It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts
   [...] to cite them other than as "work in progress."

This suggests (at least to me) that it thus is appropriate to cite ID's
as "work in progress" in other documents.  And citing ID's as work in
progress, is something that is frequently done.
Henk

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 15:33:28 -0400

> tombstones that are created for Internet-Drafts when they are 

Personally, I find tombstones for expired IDs to be useful, but only
for a limited time, e.g., 6-12 months. I don't see value in keeping
them around for eternity.

Tombstones are valuable for me because I mirror the ID directory, and
I typically search my local directory when looking for IDs. It's more
useful to find a match that indicates "an ID by this name did recently
exist, but is now expired" then to not find a match.

I would prefer having a tombstone for 6 months to having an expired ID
just "disappear". The tombstone itself provides an indication of when
the document expired, which is sometimes useful to know.

> there is a compelling reason to retain them.

I recall there being a discussion about this some time back on (?)
wgchairs. It would have been nice to include a summary of that
discussion here or otherwise provide some context for why this
proposal is being made.

> If you have an opinion on this issue and wish to contribute to the
> discussion, then please send your comments to [email-masked] by

I find it a bit surprising that followups/discussion of this topic are
being directed to a (presumably) private/closed list. Indeed, I would
have expected the ietf list to be the appropriate default for
followups.

Actually, I see that wgchairs was cc'ed, so that list may be where the
followup discussion turns out to have been held (though I think it's
worth remembering that that is _not_ a public list, nor is it the full
community). However, the list archive for wgchairs on ftp.ietf.org
(and indeed the other WGs as well) appears to end at the middle of
April.

Thus, I have no idea whether this topic has been beaten to death
already and I'm just adding noise. :-(

Thomas