Subject: Re: A little rant over draft-fenner-zinin-rtg-standard-reqts-01

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:07:08 -0800

>This now frees us up to examine the requirement for *two* independent
>implementations.

While you have some excellent points, our reasoning for changing the
requirement to 2 implementations was nowhere near that interesting.
The existing requirements for PS in 1264 were:

a) At least one implementation.
b) The spec must be written clearly enough to permit two interoperable
implementations to be written from it.

After trying to apply these guidelines for a while, we realized
that we had no real way to determine "b", and decided to switch
to 2 implementations to prove the clarity of the spec.

>From my perspective this debate reflects a change to the way that a PS is
>cast within the industry. I think that at the moment it is hard to build
>significant operational experience until publication as PS.

I think this experience varies - there are a fair number of things
that are implemented and deployed before they're I-Ds.

>A solution to this, is to introduce a new category between WG last call
>and PS. Let's call it PPS (proposed proposed standard). We would then
>advance I-Ds to PPS, allow implementation and operational experience
>before advancing to PS.

This sounds like what has been tossed around in newtrk as
"stable snapshot".

>Perhaps we should try to understand these concerns (personally, I think
>the Motivation section is fine, but I don't see the text there being
>mapped to concrete concerns, and I don't see a description of how the
>proposed solution will address the text in the Motivation section).
>1. "The Internet is being built from PSs"
>2. "There is insufficient operational experience of protocols that are
>being deployed in the Internet"

We're explicitly not trying to address #1.

It's not that we're trying to fix #2, but prevent it.

We[*] had the conversation some time ago about whether it's still
reasonable for routing protocols to have their own rules.  The
general feeling seemed to be that they do, mostly for the reasons
outlined in the motivation section.  Personally, I'm not a huge
fan, and would rather see IETF-wide consistency (e.g., if DNS
goes kaplooey, is it a bigger or lesser catastrophe for the Internet
than if routing goes kaplooey?), but the general feeling of the
community seemed to be until we have that, at least we have this.
The effort to revise 1264 came as an attempt to modernize it.

  Bill

[*] - at a routing area meeting a few years ago.  I don't think there
was followup on the list at the time.

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