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I think there are a lot of people out there unaware of RFC's (Request for Comments). I know what they are at a logical level, but can anybody give a good description for a new developer? Also, sharing some resources on how to use and read them would be nice.

latonz
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Martin York
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6 Answers6

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The term comes from the days of ARPANET, the predecessor to the internet, where the researchers would basically just throw ideas out there to, well, make a request for comments from the other researchers on the project. They could be about pretty much anything and were not very formal at the time. If you go read them, it’s pretty comical how informal they were.

Now, there are more standards about what goes in RFC's and you can't get an RFC published until you have met strict guidelines and have done extensive research. They are pretty much reserved for well researched network standards that have been approved by the IETF.

Charles Graham
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From http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/g/rfclparrequestf.htm

The name of the result and the process for creating a standard on the Internet. New standards are proposed and published on the Internet, as a Request For Comments. The proposal is reviewed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (http://www.ietf.org/), a consensus-building body that facilitates discussion, and eventually a new standard is established, but the reference number/name for the standard retains the acronym RFC, e.g. the official standard for e-mail message formats is RFC 822.

See also: RFC Wikipedia Article

xsl
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This could also mean "Request for Change" in an Agile environment. Just throwing that out there as everyone is so certain is just means "Request for Comments".

IamBatman
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    That's how it is used in my current place of work, even though they're not really agile, they pretend to be :) – J86 Nov 08 '17 at 11:50
  • I've always heard them called Change Requests probably because of the ambiguity – Alex W Feb 16 '21 at 16:30
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Wikipedia gives a good description of what [RFC] is about but in a nutshell it is a set of recommendation from the Internet Engineering Task Force applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. They are used as the standards.

So if you're looking for a definitive source of the information about the implementation of FTP, LDAP, IMAP, POP etc you don't have to look further than the appropriate RFC documents.

Ilya Kochetov
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It's a Request For Comments. That title is a little misleading though, as it's often used as a name for standards, mostly those by the IETF. See Wikipedia

Matthias Winkelmann
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As others have said, RFC is a term that was introduced by Arpanet. They are often used by standards bodies to invite stakeholders to provide feedback on proposals. They are also used internally in organizations of all shapes and sizes as part of the software development process. Here is a good resource to learn more: https://www.designdocs.dev/

Joel Tadmor
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