--On Thursday, January 09, 2014 15:47 +0100 Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > John, > > Just to be clear, I was using DNS as an example. We can > always question design decisions we've made. I believe that > Andrew and others may be interested in doing just that, but > not from the top down (as it were). Certainly we can, and should, question design decisions we've made, if only to learn from them. For the same reason, I also think it is appropriate to review and question the goal and constraint decisions that drive those design decisions But I think two points are relevant when we start doing so: (1) The observation that a decision may have political implications -- at present or at some point in the future-- does not make the decision itself political rather than technical. For the IETF's work, political considerations are best incorporated into goal and constraint spaces rather than leading us into an argument about the basis on which those decisions are made. (2) Unless one is either trying to learn in the hope of doing a better job on future designs or likes purely theoretical discussions about the circumstances that would prevail in some alternate reality, it seems to me that discussions of the implications of trying to deploy redesigned versions of something should be considered as part of the constraint space for any results of questioning design decisions. Our track record for deployment of incompatible replacements for things that work even moderately well has been, IMO, poor enough to give us considerable pause if, e.g., someone proposes to take "questioning design decisions" toward an effort to redesign, reimplement, and redeploy the DNS. My own hypothesis about that is that the DNS we have is pretty much the DNS we are going to have and that it would serve the broader community well if we both accepted that and because more aggressive about saying "not a good idea, find some other facility to use as a base" when ideas come along that require violations of important principles of the design. best, john