Subject: RE: Proposed Elimination of Tombstone Files

From: "Susan Hares" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 16:37:49 -0400

I agree.

Sue hares

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On
Behalf Of Henk Uijterwaal
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 3:57 PM
To: Rohan Mahy; [email-masked]
Cc: WG Chairs; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Proposed Elimination of Tombstone Files 

>>The IETF Chair is considering a proposal to eliminate tombstone
>>files for Internet-Drafts that have expired, or that have been
>>withdrawn or replaced.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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------
Henk Uijterwaal                           Email:
henk.uijterwaal(at)ripe.net
RIPE Network Coordination Centre
http://www.amsterdamned.org/~henk
P.O.Box 10096          Singel 258         Phone: +31.20.5354414
1001 EB Amsterdam      1016 AB Amsterdam  Fax: +31.20.5354445
The Netherlands        The Netherlands    Mobile: +31.6.55861746
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Look here junior, don't you be so happy.
And for Heaven's sake, don't you be so sad.                 (Tom
Verlaine)

---

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 20:12:27 -0700

>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.

I think they just didn't get rotated on May 1, so "current" contains
April and May.  I forgot to mention this to the secretariat when I
noticed it.

  Bill