On 11/11/2010 11:14 AM, Russ Housley wrote:
(Full) Internet Standard: The Internet community achieves rough
consensus -- on using the running code of a specification.
This causes me pause, because it does not say that the RFC was sufficient
to produce interoperable implementations.
Perhaps this is a problem with the words that were selected, but it might
be a fundamental concern. I can't tell from the draft. Please explain.
Russ,
Your diagnostic assessment is exactly right: The precise wording needs to be
better.
I -- since I'm the editor of the doc, I get wording blame -- took it as a given
that "widespread use" required interoperability. And I wish I could say that
you were the first to notice the potential hole is our existing language. (In
fact, it took some iterations before I comprehended what problem was being seen
in the language.)
Frankly, I think it's an edge condition, because the 'violation' would be having
an IETF standards track specification that gained widespread use, but with only
one implementation.
Or, at least, that's the hole in the language that has been noted to me. If you
see other problems, please explain.
To establish the base: It is not possible to achieve widespread use on the
Internet without having multiple components interacting. That's called
interoperability.
However, the interoperability might be among components that are clones of a
single code base.
So our language needs to be enhanced to cover multiple implementations. And as
long as the language hood is up, we might as well put in a turbo-booster that
asserts the higher octane 'interoperability' word.
Does that cover your concern?
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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