--On Tuesday, January 15, 2013 08:02 +0000 Brian E Carpenter
<brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
I'm not sure that's not a good thing. Witness for example the
work SIP Forum has done with the SIPConnect standards, which
have made it MUCH easier to order a box that will work with a
SIP Trunking service.
I think there are cases of standards of extreme complexity,
such as SIP, where such profiles may be useful, because
otherwise interoperability cannot be achieved. But perhaps the
lesson for the IETF here is slightly different - don't design
standards which allow that degree of complexity in the first
place.
Yes. And, if the certification test actually represents a
profile, then either:
(1) Implementations and certification tests that match a
different profile won't interoperate with this first one. That
is a problem to which a number of ITU and ISO/IEC JTC1 standards
have fallen victim.
(2) If the profile represented by the tests is really widely
accepted as being the important core of the standard and IETF
believes in its own principles, we should immediately update and
replace the Standard to remove everything not included in that
profile, accomplishing an approximation to Brian's (and my)
lower-complexity specification the hard way.
john
p.s. that latter issue raises another question about
draft-farrell-ft-03.txt and the associated Last Call. The
ability to implement a spec does not demonstrate that it
contains the minimum level of complexity needed to do the job.
Would "more complex than necessary and therefore in need of
further work" be an acceptable Last Call comment and subject to
a DISCUSS within the intent of that document?