Amanda,
As usual, your remarks are a breath of fresh air of reasonableness. Let me
climb down off my high horse a bit and reconsider what we have been saying.
I'll first talk about the process, and where we might go next, and then address
some of the policy issues separately.
First of all, I apologize for my rather snide remarks about you having
withdrawn your proposal. That was clearly your right, although it was
disconcerting to hear it second hand.
The last couple of days have been rather a roller coaster of emotion for me. I
have been debating, challenging, listening and thinking, and trying to pull all
of the sides together into some kind of a concensus compromise where we could
all move forward, but without having to have anyone "cave" to the point that
they thought their principles had been unduly savaged. I will give you, Ned,
Jim, and others credit for having engaged in the dialog in the same spirit,
although we have all gotten tired and frustrated that we have not been able to
get the others to see the essential "rightness" of our positions. Enlightenment
doesn't come easy.
I have not withdrawn my proposal; however, I think you drew some conclusions
from it that I did not intend.
Yes, I apparently did. You had said at one point that you could go along with
"nuking" the new key management stuff, or words to that effect, and although
those words were very imprecise I thought that you had given your grudging
assent to what I was saying. Your proposal seemed to say the same thing, and so
I perhaps heard what I wanted to hear.
Then, after an extended exchange between Ned and myself, he posted a note that
seemd to say that he had been misinformed, and that he was disavowing his
previous arguments. Again, perhaps I heard what I wanted to hear.
Then my hopes were suddenly dashed when he said that an offer which I thought I
understood was suddenly being removed from the table. I was quite disappointed,
and rather annoyed by the rug being jerked out from under me, so to speak, and
I may have been rather intemperate in my response -- certainly sarcastic. Maybe
someday I'll learn to do as the diplomats do -- not to say anything until the
official text becomes available. I seem to be getting older faster than wiser.
I was not meaning to propose changes to the syntax, only to the prose.
I continue to hold my position that the document should be concerned
only with representational issues, not policy. My ideas about editing
the text surround making this more explicit than it is currently, since
evidently not everyone thinks it is currently as clear as Jim, Ned, and
I do.
OK, I'll wait before commenting any further on those details.
At present, my understanding is that all of the features included in an
RFC are mandatory, so that implementors who claim RFC-compliance cannot
pick and choose what portions they would like to implement.
Generally not, actually. What *is* usually done is that a clear distinction
is made (often in capital letters for emphasis :)) between what a
compliant implementation MUST do, what it MAY do, and what it SHOULD do
(this latter is usually of the form "if you implement this feature, do
it this way"--optional feature, but normative if it is present).
Fine. Jeff Thompson and I apparently had the same misunderstanding, based on
comments made by Jim Galvin. Now I see that he said, "unless EXPLICITLY stated"
(emphasis added). Part of my concern has been that in addition to providing
license for users to use some features which I thought were rather dubious, the
RFC would force other implementors to implement those same features whether
they wanted to or not.
In general, I'm NOT in favor of implementation options in standards, as it
leads to interoperability nightmares. But in this case, if those systems which
include the options can be configured so that they aren't used, and/or if user
you don't want them wouldn't accept messages from people who used some of the
alternate forms, then interoperability would be limited in any case. Therefore,
although I promise to wait to read the revised text, one possible compromise
might be to label the more divisive sections as implementation options. that
comes as close to having our cake and eating it too as we are likely to get.
(Tangential thought -- would such a compromise do us any good with respect to a
minimal implemention of v3? I don't want to get off the track here, but it
might be worth thinking about.)
I want to watch the AFC and NFC championship games this afternoon, so I'll get
back to the main points of your longer message later this evening or tomorrow
morning.
Regards,
Bob
--------------------------------
Robert R. Jueneman
GTE Laboratories
40 Sylvan Road
Waltham, MA 02254
FAX: 1-617-466-2603
Voice: 1-617-466-282
--------------------------------
Robert R. Jueneman
GTE Laboratories
40 Sylvan Road
Waltham, MA 02254
FAX: 1-617-466-2603
Voice: 1-617-466-2820