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Re: [Tools-discuss] Last Call: <draft-sheffer-running-code-04.txt> (Improving Awareness of Running Code: the Implementation Status Section) to Experimental RFC

2013-04-28 17:06:35
On 4/28/2013 8:03 AM, Yaron Sheffer wrote:
Hi Dave,

Thank you for your thorough review. While I accept many of your
comments, I must say I disagree with you on a few points, which together
go to the core of our motivation in writing this document. Thank you for
helping me clarify these points to myself :-)

- Our goal is much *less* ambitious than defining a framework for
documenting implementations for long-term protocol projects. Our primary
goal is to aid working group members in making informed decisions about
the quality of specifications.

Forgive me, but working group members seem like the /least/ interesting target audience, since it is already the most-informed group, by virtue of its direct activity over the course of developing the specification.

The people who are most likely to benefit from pointers to implementation details are:

1. Reviewers, who want a sense of implementation history to 'season' their analysis;

2. IESG members, who are deciding whether to vote approval for the specification; and

3. Those considering adoption of the technology for use, such as other implementers and service operators.

That said, what you propose certainly accommodates #1 and #2, without needing to agree on their being a target audience...

[However the small discussion, farther down, about being better able to evaluate competing proposals, does provide an example of benefit /within/ the working group...]



- As a result of the above: 1. We define the information as pre-RFC
only; 2. The main medium is the I-D, as opposed to Web pages/wikis/CMS
(although we see them as valid alternatives); 3. We focus on WG
documents, as opposed to "all" IETF documents.

Right. And here my suggestions were merely to clarify this earlier in the proposal document.


- Despite the glowing counterexample of DKIM, it is rarely practical to
maintain implementation status information, keeping it current for years
(put bluntly, you need to pay someone to do that).

Would that I'd been getting paid... But yeah,it takes continuing effort. (On the other hand, there isn't much on-going work, after initial bursts of development activity.)

At any rate, rather than insisting that the list be external and on-going, my intention was to suggest designing it to comfortably /allow/ the wg to make the choice of either, gracefully, including an easy transition from one to the other.

 - - - - -

existence of running code.  It is up to the individual working
groups to use this information as they see fit, but one result might
be the preferential treatment of documents resulting in them being
processed more rapidly.

I think it won't be the working group that 'uses' the information, but
rather IETF management and the broader community?


For most documents, AFAIK, most work is done by the WG, and a lot less
by the rest of the community. Hence the above.

IETF Working groups do not create market demand and do not do develop or deployment. All of that is quite explicitly outside the scope of the IETF, and at industry-scale, they represent more aggregate effort than is put in by the IETF working group...



The scope of the intended experiment is all Internet-Drafts whether

Probably not all I-Ds, since they do not all contain implementable
specifications.




Sheffer & Farrel        Expires October 14, 2013                [Page
3]  Internet-Draft                Running Code
April 2013


produced within IETF working groups, outside working groups but

What I-Ds are produced by "outside working groups"?  I can't tell who
this refers to.It's probably just as well to remove the attempted case
analysis for groups and just say that the scope is all specifications
issued as I-Ds.

In fact others have commented that we should exclude individual
submissions for process reasons.

Right.  That suggests writing the scoping text a bit more tightly.


o  Participants are motivated to implement protocol proposals, which
helps in discovering protocol flaws at an early stage.

The psychological premise seems to be that getting cited in this list
will somehow serve as an incentive to implementers. I can imagine that
they'll like being listed, but find it extremely difficult to believe
that it will affect whether they do the work; not that I think it's a
deciding factor, but note that the ego value is further reduced by the
information's being ephemeral, since it it removed prior to RFC
publication!

Actually not (subtly so). The premise is making this information public
and an explicit part of WG deliberations will incentivize
implementations (i.e. not the ego factor at all).

The statements you are making about "incentives" to implementers really are in terms of their ego, since you have not stated any other benefit that will accrue to /them/. There will be benefits to the community at large, but the question in this section of text is what the motivation of the implementer will be.



o  Working group chairs and ADs may use the information provided to
help prioritize the progress of I-Ds in some way.

What does "prioritize the progress" mean?

When there are multiple competing proposals to solve some problem.

I think you are trying to say something like:

By having early implementation examples for competing proposals, the working group can better evaluate choices among them.



d/

--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

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