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Re: Last Call: <C> (On Consensus and Humming in the IETF) to Informational RFC

2013-11-09 17:26:56
On 10/11/2013 08:13, Ted Lemon wrote:
On Nov 9, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Pete Resnick 
<presnick(_at_)qti(_dot_)qualcomm(_dot_)com> wrote:
Engineering is hard. We've got to do that. Coming to consensus over the 
engineering tradeoffs is also hard; there's no one-liner like, "We always go 
with the running code". As the document says, the "running code" bit of the 
mantra is that we value actual practical experience over theoretical models. 
But running code is not itself some sort of magical thing. We still have to 
do the rest of engineering and come to consensus on whether we've gotten it 
"right". And I do think the document says that much. I don't think it should 
go much further.

Nicely put, Pete (the rest, too).   This pretty much captures my discomfort 
with the "running code" line of discussion.

Yes. Depending on where a particular document or technology has got
to, we may seek rough consensus that the idea seems promising, or that
the specification seems complete and implementable, or that it has
reached widespread deployment and seems stable, just to mention three
out of many possibilities.

Rough consensus is our method, but running code is our target.

   Brian