Retirement of refsets

We have noticed the following behaviour with Refsets and needed confirmation from IHTSDO on whether this is deliberate before we decide on whether we need to correct any functionality or not:

Refsets retired in April 2015:
Concepts retired from Metadata
All members set to inactive
All history of membership intact.
What happened in Oct 2015 via migration utility:
Concepts still in Metadata as retired
All history of the membership removed as if the refset never existed.
IHTSDO position:

There are two possible approaches here, as detailed above - both have issues, but the last time we discussed this the prevailing preference in the Advisory Group was to retain the history in the International edition.

The major issue with this is that then if a customer wants to consume the segregated refset, they would then have to download the entire International edition just to gain access to the history for that one refset.

Does anyone have another, less problematic solution to propose?

Most people still of the opinion that the history should be retained in the International edition - however everyone is mindful of the theoretical use case of the customer who wants to consume the segregated refset.

@Andrew Atkinson provided the concrete example of GMDN refset from last year, which was required for consumption outside of the International edition after retirement - however this is an outlying example as this situation should never re-occur (due to the fact that any other product with similar licensing restrictions will, going forward, always be published separately to the International edition from inception).

The group therefore requested further examples and use cases to consider - @Former user (Deleted) agreed to investigate and provide these accordingly.

Discussion Files