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Re: Question related to draft-hansen-4468upd-mailesc-registry-02.txt and RFC3463

2007-08-04 16:37:27



--On Saturday, 04 August, 2007 19:09 -0400 Jeff Macdonald
<jmacdonald(_at_)e-dialog(_dot_)com> wrote:

...
John and Ned, you both mentioned 'worth the effort'. Is that
because you both believe the RFC wouldn't be an "Independent
Submission"? I'm very new to this whole process, so forgive me
if this is a stupid question.

It is certainly not a stupid question.   The question (at least
my version -- Ned might have a different one) is whether it
would be worth the trouble for existing server implementations
to change their code and existing client implementations to
adapt to the new subseries.   Clearly the latter should fall
back to "first digit" if they don't recognize the second one or
what is going on generally, but we've had a lot of nasty
experiences with implementations that think they know more than
the specs think they ought to know and that might balk at a new
subseries.

So the question is whether this change would have enough value
to tell the community that they should go change things and
whether the implementer community would believe it has enough
value to be worth the trouble to make those changes.  I have my
doubts about both.

Compared to either of those questions, the cost of pushing a
relatively short and clear document through the IETF system is
fairly low although I would discourage you from trying unless
you think the answers to those questions would be "yes, enough
implementers would believe this is worthwhile to do it if the
spec were written and approved".

     john