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Re: Last Call: draft-ogud-iana-protocol-maintenance-words (Definitions for expressing standards requirements in IANA registries.) to BCP

2010-03-17 18:12:36
At 9:43 AM +1300 3/18/10, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
In my opinion this is not ready for prime time.

I agree with all of Brian's issues, and add another one that is equally, if not 
more, significant. This document talks about an IANA registry having entries 
for compliance, but does not describe what the compliance is applied to.

3.1.  MANDATORY

  This is the strongest requirement and for an implementation to ignore
  it there MUST be a valid and serious reason.

  Implementations:  To be considered compliant, all implementations
     MUST support this registry entry.
  Operations:  To be considered compliant, operations MUST use at least
     one of the mandatory entries.
  Note 1:  There can be more than one MANDATORY requirement.
  Note 2:  The requirement applies only to new or future
     implementations on the day the requirement is released.  In many
     cases existing implementations can become compliant via software
     upgrade or point release.

Look at an IANA registry such as the one that prompted this draft, 
<http://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-sec-alg-numbers/dns-sec-alg-numbers.xhtml>.
 If there is an algorithm that is now marked "MANDATORY", and your 
implementation did not have it, you would not be in compliance with the 
registry.

The IETF has never had a concept of compliance to an IANA registry, which is a 
good thing. Suggesting that we should start doing that now is just plain wrong.

It is *fine* to have an RFC specify which algorithms must be implemented / 
supported / whatever for compliance to the RFC; we do that now just fine. When 
the community agrees on changes to what is needed to comply with an RFC, you 
update the RFC; we now do that just fine as well.

Putting new words in an IANA registry will make things more confusing, not less.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
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