So, I was reading Brian's draft and I noticed that it talks a lot about interoperability, but does not actually define interoperability. As discussed in a recent IESG appeal, it's not clear that we have a clear statement of our interoperability goals. There's some text in section 4 of RFC 2026, but we seem to actually want to go farther than that text. I propose that we add a definition of interoperability to Brian's document. In particular, we want to talk about our desire that all implementations of one role of an IETF spec interoperate (at least with regard to mandatory features) with implementations of corresponding roles. For example if we have a client-server protocol, then you should be able to take any client and have it work with any server at least for the mandatory parts of the protocol. There are a lot of complexities--for example while we hope every IP stack works with every other IP stack, two machines may not share a common upper-layer protocol or application protocol. But I think we should try and write down the core concept of this. If people would find this useful I can try to write text. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf