On 7/28/16 1:06 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
And there's our problem, right there. Protocols without APIs are
pretty much useless these days. IPv6 without a socket API would have
been an abject failure. Without RFC 2133, RFC 2292 and their successors,
who knows how the POSIX and Winsock support for IPv6 would have turned
out?
Not specifying APIs in the IETF clearly doesn't mean that
there are no APIs, clearly.
I'm certainly open to the possibility that we start tackling APIs
but I'm not sure it's a terrific idea. For one thing, we already
have too much work. For another, I'm not sure we'd produce
particularly good APIs. It's a different skill from developing and
specifying network protocols. And thirdly, I'm not convinced that the
people implementing our protocols would want IETF-developed APIs.
This is completely subjective but my own sense is that the
#1 problem we have related to open source projects we take years
to produce specifications.
Melinda