todd glassey wrote: > Elliot - > Then you leave it up to the party providing the service and open the IETF to > all kinds of trouble... By the way Elliot do you think your sponsor, Cisco > and their Legal department would let Cisco negotiate a contract like that? This may be where some of the confusion is arising. RFPs are not contracts. For the most part, in an RFP you want to specify WHAT you want to accomplish, not the details of HOW it should be done. While on the one hand it may be reasonable to specify a certain minimal level of support (I think that http and ftp fall into this category, for example), rather than specifying an implementation detail like "must supply rsync" it might be better to spec "some form of efficient distribution and/or mirroring software." I for one have always thought that it would be nice to be able to use cvsup to maintain a local mirror, which is oodles more efficient than rsync. Meanwhile, there is a lot of good work going on with other VCS platforms that might be even better. (And don't even get me started on how useful it would be for at least some of the work of editing documents, at all levels, to be in a good VCS.) The hope (although sometimes pollyannish, hope none the less) is always that by making your desired end result sufficiently clear, without specifying implementation in nauseating detail, that you might be able to find a contractor who has more creative ideas for solving these problems than you do. I'd like to see the RFP language be open enough to allow for that. hth, Doug -- If you're never wrong, you're not trying hard enough _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf