My only question was WHEN best to introduce the
changes. You've indicated you didn't want to hold up progresing PEM/MIME to
standards track in order to include this, and I can understand why. Assuming
that, I was merely asking how and when to make the change -- during the
Proposed Standard phase as a revision, or at some checkpoint? What is your
recommendation?
It is hard to say without having a draft. If the changes to RFC1422 are
nontrivial I think it needs to be incorporated and recycled at proposed,
if not it can be separate and progress on its own.
I doubt that you or the other implementors are holding your breath waiting for
the standard to be progressed, so it is germane to ask what your (collective)
internal development cycles might be, when such changes could best be
accommodated, and what the effect would be on the subsequent versions.
Since I don't develop cert code of my own (yet), this would be something I'd
negotiate with the people who do develop it. My hope would be to have
support for it within six months after the format becomes final. (This
assumes we're in a position to support any of it.)
For example, are you a week away from beta testing, or six months, or a year?
I'm about a month or two away from testing MIME/PEM functionality.
When is the best time to phase this in, and what kind of interoperability
problems are we likely to face if we do this deliberately rather than under
forced draft?
Again, this depends too much on the content to be able to assess right now.
Ned