On 06/12/2016 02:35 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:
On 6/12/16 6:31 AM, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote:
[...]
3. Focus on linking open standards to code, operationals, and
interoperability.
My view on this evolved these last years. Few years ago I was
convinced that developing a reference implementation at the same time
than a specification and testing it against other people
implementations was the right way to to find bugs in the
specification. I even applied that idea when RFC 6940 was developed.
Sure I found hundred of issues in the draft (and got "punished" for
it by becoming - with Dean Willis - informal editors of the draft).
But, in spite of my best efforts, my implementation could not cover
100% of the specification, so if on the one hand that made the
specification better, on the other hand it certainly did not made the
specification good by any of my standards.
I think this is a fair point but I'd like to mention what I
thought was one of the more interesting things to happen at an
IETF hackathon, which is that one group found they couldn't
implement a draft in its current form because it was wrong, and
they needed to go back and fix the specification. I understand
that you're arguing that formal methods would provide greater
coverage, and I agree (and I hope you'll set up a small side
meeting or some such on this in Berlin),
Yes hackathons are great, and that and rfc6982 are a huge improvements. But
that's short term, on the long-term we'll have to prove that our protocols
works as expected (i.e are verifiable), not just randomly guess that they may
work for the cases we know about. That's also why I think that writing a draft
should be simpler than it is today - not to attract more authors, but because
soon we'll have to add a whole new layer of complexity on top of it.
The plan is to present my work in March in Chicago. Meanwhile I'll be
attending the reception in Berlin on Sunday, so if there is enough interest
then we can setup a place and time during the week to discuss that.
--
Marc Petit-Huguenin
Email: marc(_at_)petit-huguenin(_dot_)org
Blog: http://blog.marc.petit-huguenin.org
Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/petithug
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