Werner Koch wrote:
On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 11:30:24 +0100, Ian Grigg said:
2. what is the process? Do we vote, do we pray or do we
send bribes?
We need to get a rough consensus within this WG.
OK. I'd say it is good to go. With or without the handful
of minor changes suggested in the last few days.
Any other entries into consensual roughness?
5. How to we get into Draft Standard status?
We have talked for years about interoperability tests but we never
actually did anything. AFAIK, there is no formal process for such
a tests and I ask myself whether it is sufficient that the 2 oldest
implementations (PGP and GnuPG) have shown over the years that they
are quite good interoperable and that the last OpenPGP glitches
have been sorted out with the last releases of both programs. We
could probably come up with a collection of discussions as evidence
to what we have tested during the development.
OK, I am guessing here that interoperability tests
are required to get to draft standard.
a. does that have a bearing on the RFC process for
bis-11? Or is it independent?
b. can someone summarise what has been said in the
past about interoperability?
c. without any thought or research, I'd suggest
something like the following:
i. a program for each implementation that produced
an example of each type of message.
ii. a program for each that reads the examples in i.
iii. ideally, a service where an implementation can
be put into random spit mode, where it churns out
a squillion of these random messages of all forms,
iv. again, a service where an implementation can
process a squillion random messages.
Then, take the two implementations and run them against
each other. (This is how I test my stuff.) It has one
particular hole in it, as it doesn't cover how an
implementation deals with an illegal message. But that's
a security issue not an implementation issue.
d. or, anything else?
iang