Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
This decision raises a somewhat larger issue, namely whether deferring
to implementor desires is always the right thing to do. Compared to
implementers, there are many more users and system administrators. For
the reasons discussed earlier and alluded to below, they now lose in
having poorer error handling and more abuse. I thought standards
writers and implementer were supposed to serve end users (and maybe
the large number of people having to install and manage things), not
the other way around. Maybe this is another instance of the
oft-bemoaned absence of operators from the IETF discussion. End users
seem to be even more absent, even indirectly.
Agreed. I see this as a big step in the wrong direction. No one has
given a good reason for doing it other than 'its similar to what happens
in IPv4', 'it makes life easier for people with awful internal
procedures' and 'it saves us 3 lines of code in our software'. None of
those are good enough reasons IMHO, given all the reasons not to do it.
It might end up not being a big deal except for mail server
administrators at big companies or ISPs, but it *might* be a massive
deal, and given the easy change we could make now, I think it's a big
opportunity being missed.