Summary

  • RFC 1142 was a republication of an ISO draft, not an Internet standard; its own front matter says so.
  • RFC 7142 later said that draft differed significantly from the finalized ISO/IEC 10589 editions and had been cited in their place.

In February 1990, RFC 1142 offered Internet readers a readily available copy of the OSI IS-IS routing text. Its status paragraph described the document as a republication of ISO DP 10589 “as a service to the Internet community” and explicitly said, “This is not an Internet standard.” The cover, however, labels the source ISO/IEC DIS 10589. The record itself therefore carries two stage names—DP in the explanatory paragraph, DIS on the cover—rather than a single tidy label. RFC 1142

The copy’s convenience came with a version boundary. RFC 7142, published in 2014, says the republished ISO Draft Proposal differed in a considerable number of significant respects from the finalized ISO/IEC 10589:1992 and its 2002 second edition. It also says RFC 1142 had been “unwittingly quoted or referenced” in place of ISO/IEC 10589. Those are the later memo’s account of the problem; it supplies neither a count of mistaken citations nor a clause-by-clause comparison. The record supports a documentary warning, not a claim that a particular router ran the wrong text. RFC 7142

The distinction matters because three labels answer different questions. “RFC” identifies a publication in the RFC series. “Not an Internet standard” describes RFC 1142’s own standards status. “Historic” is the later classification shown for RFC 1142 by the IETF Datatracker. None, alone, tells us which specification an operator implemented. In 2014, RFC 7142 pointed readers to the second edition of ISO/IEC 10589 as the normative IS-IS reference; it did not say that the protocol itself had become obsolete. IS-IS had separately been extended for IP by RFC 1195. RFC 1142 record, RFC 7142 record, Datatracker: RFC 1142, RFC 1195

The repair was a redirection of authority, not deletion. RFC 1142 remains readable; RFC 7142 marks it obsolete and of historic interest. Readers can still inspect the old copy, but should not substitute it for the finalized ISO standard. The important historical consequence is modest and durable: once a draft has its own stable publication identity, later corrections can change how it should be cited without removing the earlier text from the record.

Sources