On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 03:45:11PM +0200, John Martin wrote:
I do remember. We have been publishing iCAP as an ID for at least the
existence of the WREC WG. The implementation problem is something we also
share though in iCAP's case, it is due (mostly) to 1) the changes we made
to the protocol as we developed (e.g. chunking) and 2) mistakes in the
document. That is exactly why we are proposing to publish it as
"Informational" now. Our proposal is not to declare iCAP the definite
content vectoring protocol. It is simply to fix the (known) bugs in the
document and publish it.
What iCAP protocol? You may not be able to see this progression from the
inside of NetApp, but here is the status of iCAP from the viewpoint of an
independent implementer of the specification and a member of the iCAP forum:
1) A press release was made
2) Roughly eight months later, a specification was sent out as a draft
3) A bunch of organizations tried to implement according to that draft
and found that it was hopelessly screwed for performance
4) Several of the implementers came up with independent theories on
how best to correct those issues, some variations of which were
packaged within beta releases of system software
5) The pwg was formed to make some coherence out of those changes into
a protocol draft to be submitted as an Internet Draft (v0.9)
6) More experience implementing the protocol uncovered differing opinions
as to what the spec meant and why it was no longer HTTP compliant
even though it was (at the time) attempting to be.
7) Discussion moved to WREC, where the protocol was completely changed
to disregard HTTP compatibility but continue to use the least desirable
aspects of HTTP syntax, several spec errors were fixed (and more
introduced), and a draft was issued as iCAP 1.0.
8) Discussion continued regarding both minor spec errors and major
design issues, extending from WREC to OPES.
In other words, I have no idea which iCAP you are claiming to be ready for
publication as an RFC. I have yet to see a single implementation of iCAP 1.0
as defined by the current specification. Judging from the comments discussed,
that draft contains many inconsistencies and incompatibilities with even
NetApp's implementation of the protocol. So, what on earth gives you the
right to declare that draft as a representation of iCAP-as-implemented?
Continue with the current publication process. Edit the specification to
reflect what has been implemented and identify what versions of what software
are considered implementations of the protocol, so that we can independently
verify that the specification is correct. Then we can decide whether or not
it is ready for publication as an RFC, and with what status the RFC should
be labeled. Feel free to ignore the OPES functionality and requirements for
this version of iCAP, but publishing a specification that matches nobody's
implementation exceeds my threshold of IETF abuse.
....Roy