How to proceed with "Request to Move RFC 1643 to Historic Status"?

Colleagues,

Some time ago John Flick and I submitted the draft
<draft-ietf-hubmib-1643-to-historic-00.txt>, entitled
"Request to Move RFC 1643 to Historic Status", for
working group review.  The discussion that took place
was inconclusive -- some thought that moving the spec
to Historic was appropriate, while others (notably Bob
Braden and Andrew Smith) advocated leaving it at
Standard but writing an Applicability Statement that
specifies the (limited) situations to which it applies.

So let me ask:  what do you think?  Is requesting historic
status for 1643 the right way to go, or should we instead
write an Applicability Statement saying that 1643 should
not be used for new implementations, but may continue to
be used for already-deployed interfaces that support
10 Mb/sec half-duplex mode only?  Or is some other
alternative preferred?

Two points to consider:

- a half-duplex 10 Mbps interface that supports all
the required objects in RFC 1643 _will_ conform to
dot3Compliance2 in the current EtherLike-MIB in
<draft-ietf-hubmib-etherif-mib-v3-02.txt> (and
will in addition implement the deprecated object
dot3StatsEtherChipSet, which is no longer required);

- however, such an implementation _may fail_ to
support the mauModIfCompl3 compliance statement of
the MAU-MIB in <draft-ietf-hubmib-mau-mib-v3-02.txt>,
since the requirement to do so postdates RFC 1643
(the requirement was levied because failure to
implement the MAU-MIB leaves applications with
no standard way to determine the media type in use,
and no standard way to control duplex status, if
such control is supported).

Your feedback would be most helpful in deciding how
to move forward on this.

Regards,

Mike