Subject: [straw] Barry Leiba's No Objection on draft-ietf-straw-b2bua-dtls-srtp-09: (with COMMENT)

From: "Barry Leiba" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2015 20:38:05 -0800

Barry Leiba has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-straw-b2bua-dtls-srtp-09: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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I support at least some of Alissa's and Stephen's DISCUSS points.

In particular, I'm not fully in agreement with Alissa on her point 1: We
do sometimes (and should) make normative statements about how protocols
should work and should be used, even with knowledge that those statements
may (will) be ignored.  Sometimes it's to keep the protocol tight;
sometimes it's to provide a lever ("The IETF has a standard that says
that what you're doing is wrong!").

Because of that, Alissa's point 2 is particularly important: We have to
stop the general practice of watering down normative statement in
protocols as a way of mollifying people who don't like them.  If the
right thing is to say "MUST do X", we should not say "SHOULD do X"
because we know that some implementations don't and won't do X.  In
particular, here, if there's any value in this, it's necessary to be
strict and clear to expose that value.

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From: "Ben Campbell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2015 14:50:48 -0600

On 2 Dec 2015, at 22:38, Barry Leiba wrote:

> Please refer to 
> https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html

What do you think about using non-2119 language for this sort of thing? 
E.d. "If you do/don't do X, the following bad things will happen..."? As 
an individual, I favor that approach for cases where we want to give 
people reasons to change behavior, and don't expect the 2119 stick to 
work.

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2015 16:00:22 -0500

> What do you think about using non-2119 language for this sort of thing? E.d.
> "If you do/don't do X, the following bad things will happen..."? As an
> individual, I favor that approach for cases where we want to give people
> reasons to change behavior, and don't expect the 2119 stick to work.

It depends, I guess, on what the aim is.  If the aim is to write an
informational document, that's fine -- and then we have to decide
whether there's enough value in that.  If the aim is to *say* how the
protocol should work, then we should write a proper applicability
statement with the proper MUSTs and MUST NOTs.

As this document is currently written, it looks like it intends to be
the latter, but isn't quite there.

Barry