John,
The closest we ever came were the various host and router requirements RFCs (1122, 1123, 1812, etc.), plus a few others here and there like RFC 7766.
Cheers,
Andy
On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 6:55 PM John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
--On Sunday, October 23, 2022 08:18 +1100 Lloyd W
<lloyd.wood=40yahoo.co.uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On 22 Oct 2022, at 03:43, Miles Fidelman
>> <mfidelman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> It does lead me to wonder about how we got away from writing
>> compliance tests for everything. And, a follow-up thought
>> that, perhaps, a compliance test might be a nice thing to add
>> to RFCs (at least those that proceed to standards) - with
>> IETF or ISOC or maybe ICANN maintaining a reference server to
>> test against.
>
> Well, it's "rough consensus and running code" and not
> "rigorous compatibility and RFC compliance".
>
> last I checked, standards required two separate interoperable
> implementations - so which one would be favoured and chosen
> for your reference server?
Another reason is that there has been a great deal of experience
showing that, if an SDO produces compliance tests, those tests,
and not the written text, rapidly become the standard. If the
test does not cover absolutely everything, that can be bad news.
It gets particularly problematic for IETF specs because it is
hard to express "SHOULD" or "SHOULD NOT". I'm also unsure about
"got away from" -- as far as I know, the IETF, as the IETF, has
never specified compliance or validation tests for its standards
track documents.
john
