Scott Lawrence wrote: > On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 13:17 -0800, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote: >> I would like to bring to your attention this proposal to put back >> running code at the center of Internet protocol design by adding a >> new Considerations Section in future Internet-Drafts and RFCs: >> >> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-petithuguenin-running-code-considerations-00.txt > > I oppose the addition of such a mandatory or formalized section, despite > the fact that I very much support measuring specification quality and > community support by looking for running code. > > I oppose even more this part of the definition of "running code": > > The minimum rights that should be granted for this source code > are the right to duplicate it for purpose of reading it and the > right to execute it or generate the binary code to execute it. > > I spend nearly all my time and energy these days on open source > software, so this would not be a barrier for me, but it would be for > many people whose contributions are important. > > More importantly, I have no need (or desire) to look at the source code > for an implementation to determine whether or not it matches the > specification and interoperates with other implementations. It is > behavior on the wire that we are concerned with in the IETF - we don't > specify how a protocol is implemented, we specify the behavior it > exhibits. The reason is to evaluate implementation complexity. Protocol behavior on the wire does not permit to do. Sometimes a protocol or feature are rejected because it is thought to be too complex to implement - a good example would be the time-switch in CPL, where IIRC an implementation permitted to have the calendar feature back in the spec. History-Info is an example of something that is thought more more complex to implement that it is in reality - here also showing some code would have helped to demonstrate that it is not the case. The opposite is probably true, i.e. some protocols or features would have been abandoned when looking at the complexity of implementing it (especially considering the correlation between code complexity and security issues) -- Marc Petit-Huguenin Home: marc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Work: petithug@xxxxxxx _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf