Comment by q-big | Hacker News Reader

Comment by q-big | Hacker News Reader

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See the Abstract and Section "1. Purpose and Scope":

"Over this time, a number of changes have been made to TCP as it was specified in RFC 793, though these have only been documented in a piecemeal fashion. This document collects and brings those changes together with the protocol specification from RFC 793. This document obsoletes RFC 793, as well as RFCs 879, 2873, 6093, 6429, 6528, and 6691 that updated parts of RFC 793."

"The purpose of this document is to bring together all of the IETF Standards Track changes and other clarifications that have been made to the base TCP functional specification (RFC 793) and to unify them into an updated version of the specification."

Nevertheless, it seems that some updates and clarifications were also done:

"It updates RFCs 1011 and 1122, and it should be considered as a replacement for the portions of those documents dealing with TCP requirements. It also updates RFC 5961 by adding a small clarification in reset handling while in the SYN-RECEIVED state. The TCP header control bits from RFC 793 have also been updated based on RFC 3168."

Isn't this kind of a flaw in the RFC process? Shouldn't we have been amending the original spec this whole time and tagging new versions, source control style?

The legal system has a similar problem, though it's ironically even more obvious because amendments to laws will be something like "Page 143, Paragraph 7, Sentence 4 will now read ..." which is just literally writing out a diff.

I'm feeling salty at the moment because for various reasons I'm deep in the OpenID Connect specifications right now, and while they're available the overall formatting, layout and hyperlinking is just awful for rapidly conveying meaning (and like all things OAuth the spec by everyone else also can't be trusted).

Surely we can and should do better.

Yeah. This is part of the issue that legislative codification is supposed to deal with. A new law is often making a diff to the old one, and you can either keep a pile of diffs in hand and work out what the current state is in your head, or you can try to make sure there is a 'master version' (the Code) which you keep patching and can check out a fresh version of when you need to read it.

England and Wales (my home jurisdiction) doesn't have either criminal or civil codes as such, but it does do a fair number of consolidating statutes - almost exactly like this new RFC. The Sexual Offences Act 2003, for example, made some changes but also consolidated the current state of sexual offences law into a single Act[0]. (You can also now see the 'as amended' versions on the web for all Acts, which is useful. If you want to know which bits of Magna Carta are still in force, well now you can[1]. This Act has the additional problem that source control was fairly shoddy in 1297 and it's not entirely clear what the actual text in force is...)

[0]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42 [1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9

That's mostly just the case of a long-running system: It was a sensible choice in the day, and apparently it's held up, considering we're talking about an RFC revised 41 years later.

I do wish it was more clear how one could engage in the process: I will literally not sleep soundly at night until the HSTS standard is revised to remove it's malicious component (the "no user recourse" clause), but I also... really have no idea where to start on getting it amended.

Now i am waiting for the equivalent for http.

It is the same nightmare of piecemeal changes...

No need to wait; HTTP got a similar full overhaul across several RFCs. Read all about it from one of the editors:

- https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/06/http-core

- https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/08/http-extensions

That happened already, no? https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/06/07/rfc2616_is_dead

This[1] might be what you're looking for.

[1]: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/06/http-core

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