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Re: draft-freed-sieve-in-xml status?

2008-12-15 12:43:03

Ned Freed writes:
>>  is there a compliance test suite?
>
> Not as far as I know.

I wrote the guts of something like that after Prague IETF, where there
was a discussion about advancing sieve to draft. I stopped working on
it that when various people didn't reply to email about it (I did not
feel up to a one-man crusade), but people seem to care more now and
I'll return to it when one of my current drafts passes IESG.

> I certainly have no plans to write one or subject our implementation
> to any that someone else develops. I doubt if anyone else does
> either.

And I do hope you will review the document and run the code.

Not if it's labelled as a compliance test. Again, I have no objections to unit
tests or sample scripts and use them all the time.

Compliance tests are another matter entirely. I realize evenyone has nothing
but the best intentions here, but you know what's paved with those...

If we release something we call a compliance suite it would be terribly easy
for someone to take advantage of all that nice new copyright boilerplate that
allows unrestricted use and take the code and turn it into a for-profit
compliance test. It's but one step from there to RFPs requiring passage
of that test.

Really, you cannot know just how radioactive these things can be until you've
gone through a bunch of them. You may think that such tests are amenable to a
bright line standard of pass/fail, but that's just not how it ever ends up.
There's always interpretation of results involved, especially when  you're
probing for implementation limits (which these things always seem to do), and
that leads to, um, let's call them "discussions" between the implementor and
tester.

I'm going to refrain from giving specific examples because to be blunt I'd
rather not open that particular folder of old mail and have to remember the
details of what transpired.

                                Ned

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