On 22/10/2022 23:54, John C Klensin 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.
Well, one that might qualify is RFC2580 and all the RFC that cite it
which is almost all MIB modules including the recently approved
draft-ietf-ipsecme-mib-iptfs.
YANG chose not to go down that route.
Tom Petch
john
.
