Facilites for manipulating indexes of rfcs and internet drafts

Contents

Installation

You need You will need to decide on a local directory, visible to your web server, where you will store the rfc-index.tag file.

You may also find it useful to store copies of RFCs which you find particularly relevant in the same directory.

Build and intstall the tag utilities.

Install the rfc script in your cgi-bin directory, and edit it to reflect the location of your rfc directory, and the url prefix for it.

If you have local copies of rfcs you should run the add_X-local-url_tags script.

Use a web browser to look at your copy of the rfc script.

Operations

The Hide Obsoleted button (selected by default) suppresses the display of RFCs which have been obsoleted by a later one.

The Show Local RFCs only button, if selected, restricts display to RFCs which have the X-local-url tag in your copy of the rfc-index.tag file - this tag is added by the add_X-local-url_tag script, see below under maintenance.

Select RFCs by keyword and/or status. All selections are cumulative, i.e. the displayed RFCs must match all the specified constraints.

The index of selected RFCs can be displayed as a list, which gives all the known information about them, or as a table, which is more compact, but just shows the name, title and a URL to click on to view the RFC.

The display as Raw is experimental - it displays in raw tag format, and is intended to be developed to work with browsers which understand the tag format directly.

When displaying RFCs in table format you can select whether the URL which is displayed points to your local copy of the RFCs or to the master copies at Internic.

Maintenance

You should check this page from time to time to see if any of the components have been updated.

Pick up a new copy of the rfc-index.tag file from time to time. At present some of the fields are being tidied up, and new keywords are being added, once this process is complete there will be a mailing list (a reformated version of the main rfc-dist list) and you will simply need to subscribe to that list.

If you pick up a new copy of rfc-index.tag, or add or remove local RFCs you should execute the add_X-local-url_tags script in the local rfc directory. This will produce a report in that directory called rfc-report.html - you should read it to check if any of your local RFCs have been obsoleted by more recent versions.

Note that if you send a copy of your rfc-index.tag to someone else you should remove the X-local-url tags from the copy you send them.

The current tagged rfc-index file

The current rfc-index.tag file was created with the tools mentioned below, with keywords added by hand.

The present version is still being developed and I would be glad to receive any differences or updated versions.

The current version contains RFCs up to 2228, but many keywords remain to be added.

Advanced notes

The following sections are about the inner workings, background scripts etc - you can stop reading here if you only want to run the programs.

Facilities for building tagged rfc index files

There is a perl script index2tag.pl which converts an rfc-index.txt file from ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc-index.txt into a set of tagged records, which can be manipulated with the various tag-types programs

Another Perl script rfc-dist2tag converts the announcement messages on the rfc-dist mailing list into tagged records.

If you keep a local directory with the RFCs you use most often then you can use the add_X-local-url_tags script to flag the RFCs which you hold locally. These are used by the rfc cgi-bin script to provide links to your local RFCs. If you send your rfc-index.tag file to someone else you should remove the X-local-url tags as they will only be meaningful to you.

Tag descriptor file

Every tagged type has a tagged descriptor file. The one for RFCs can be found here

The description of the fields in the descriptor file can be found here

Future plans

There are several planned enhancements.