-----Original Message-----
From: ietf [mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of Melinda
Shore
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 10:31 PM
To: Brian E Carpenter; Suzanne Woolf
Cc: IETF discussion list
Subject: Re: bettering open source involvement
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.
This! +1000