On 14 Sep 2007 at 09:38 -0400, Thomas Narten allegedly wrote: > David Conrad <drc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > As I have said elsewhere, I've come to believe that one of the > > fundamental failures of the IETF is that it permits or even > > encourages protocol design to be directed by corner cases. But corner cases do need to be considered. If nothing else they inform the design. If there is a process failure, it's a failure to correctly evaluate the significance of the corner cases considered. Coming up with the corner cases is clever, but figuring out which ones to take seriously is harder, as it requires accurately predicting technological, cultural, political and economic futures. We could use some more capability there. > This is sometimes very true. But I disagree that this is the reason > we haven't done an ID/Loc split yet. At the end of the day, we have > yet to see a real design fleshed out in enough detail that folk can > honestly say "yep, I think we can make this work in practice and I > think I understand how the pieces will all fit together". And I'm > talking about _all_ the pieces, not just the 80% that are the > easiest and we know how to do. Agree (but we're trying for the next 5%). > > Actually, I suspect if the work were to happen in the IRTF, it would > > be doomed. The IRTF is, after all, focused on research. > > If there is engineering work to do, make the case it is ready for the > IETF. Personally, I think the ID/Loc work is still in that gray area > between engineering and research. Ready for engineering means we know > how to do it, there are no hard problems to still work out. We just > need to agree on a standard way to do something. > > On the other hand, if we don't know how to do a scalable mapping > part yet, that sounds like research to me. (Insert long-running > discussion here about how DNS is or is not good enough to provide > this functionality.) I prefer to keep things out of WGs until we know what it is we're supposed to *engineer*, or at least until figuring that out won't take long. > > I can imagine the people in the IRTF contributing towards a solution > > but that isn't where a solution will come from. Given real world > > constraints, a solution will come from engineers (protocol, network, > > hardware, and/or software), singly or working together, coming up > > with an approach that meets real world requirements (not what > > researchers believe are real world requirements). It almost > > certainly won't be architecturally pure and it probably won't be > > pretty, but it will probably meet commercial and operational needs. > > Yep. But I would hope that the research side can do the work that > leads to answering the previous question with an answer of "yep, I > think we know how to this and can make it work and just need to agree > on the bits." It's a continuum. RRG is full of people who consider themselves engineers and who participate in the IETF as well. swb _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf