I think the first issue is to decide the actual purpose Deferred is meant to be
serving - according to XEP-0001, that is essentially "was experimental, but has
had no attention for 12 months;" I don't think anyone has a problem with that.
The problem comes from nothing happening beyond this point; so there they sit:
maybe they'll be resurrected, maybe they'll just rot. So now we have a huge
pile of Deferred XEPs, some of which were temporarily left due to the author
being otherwise busy, some of those subsequently fell off the radar, and others
that were intentionally abandoned - with little way to tell the difference.
Some people are content with this ("if the author cares enough, they can always
pick it up again"); others would like to at least remove the entirely-abandoned
so it's easier to see what's actually relevant.
Jonas's idea is to review one each week, but given that there are currently 177
Deferred XEPs, that would take 3.5 years (assuming 50 per year) and further
months for the additional pile deferred since. Of course, doing several per
week would be too much work, and a waste of effort that could be put to better
use.
My own preference would be for Deferred to represent a state of "good idea;
still needs more work; contributions welcome" - which it arguably already does,
but it also includes many that should legitimately be obsoleted (not that it's
worth anyone's time to figure out by what), reducing the signal-noise ratio.
For interest:
- 177 Deferred: 154 Standards, 19 Informational, 3 Historical, 1 SIG
- eldest: 16.5 years
- oldest 25%: 10.7+ years
- oldest 50%: 6.5+ years
- oldest 75%: 1.3+ years
As a quick first pass, maybe we could take the oldest 25% (44 XEPs), community
gives them a quick look over to decide whether they could ever have any
possible minuscule interest, if so they make it known (no justification
necessary, just the XEP numbers), and then after some appropriate period we say
that the remainder can safely be rejected. I suspect the vast majority of these
can be swept away as being no longer appropriate/relevant/interesting.
_______________________________________________
Standards mailing list
Info: https://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/standards
Unsubscribe: [email protected]
_______________________________________________
