Alexey,The goal of this particular exercise is to advance RFC 3852 *without* revision, so I called out the normative references as specified in the document: RFCs 3280 and 3281. It is true that RFC 3280 has been obsoleted by RFC 5280, and that draft-ietf-pkix-3281update is intended to update 3281. (Both documents cycled/are cycling at Proposed, so they would still be downrefs even if we submitted a 3852bis to address the references.) And, yes this makes it more confusing to determine whether a downref is appropriate.
I would personally factor the clarifications in RFC 5280 in my evaluation of the downrefs, since I would use it as the basis for any new implementation of 3852, but would not consider 3281update since it is still a working document and subject to change.
To me, the question for the community is whether RFC 3852 achieves the expected characteristics of a Draft Standard (as described in 2026) in spite of these downrefs:
A Draft Standard must be well-understood and known to be quite stable, both in its semantics and as a basis for developing an implementation.
I believe the implementation report adequately demonstrates RFC 3852 *in its totality* is well-understood and provides a stable basis for developing interoperable implementations. To my mind, this makes advancement appropriate in spite of the two downrefs.
Thanks, Tim On Apr 27, 2009, at 12:15 PM, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
The IESG wrote:The IESG has received a request from the smime WG (smime) to consider the following document:Speaking as a member of the IETF community I find the question confusing, considering that both documents were obsoleted (or just about to be obsoleted in case of RFC 3281). Shouldn't this be RFC 5280 and draft-ietf-pkix-3281update-04.txt?- 'Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) ' RFC 3852 as a Draft StandardNo technical issues were raised during the first Last Call. However, the Last Call failed to highlight two normative references to standards trackdocuments of lower maturity: RFCs 3280 and 3281.This abbreviated Last Call is focused solely on whether downrefs to theseProposed Standards are appropriate in the context of RFC 3852._______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf