On 7/28/16 1:06 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
And there's our problem, right there. Protocols without APIs are pretty much useless these days. IPv6 without a socket API would have been an abject failure. Without RFC 2133, RFC 2292 and their successors, who knows how the POSIX and Winsock support for IPv6 would have turned out?
Not specifying APIs in the IETF clearly doesn't mean that there are no APIs, clearly. I'm certainly open to the possibility that we start tackling APIs but I'm not sure it's a terrific idea. For one thing, we already have too much work. For another, I'm not sure we'd produce particularly good APIs. It's a different skill from developing and specifying network protocols. And thirdly, I'm not convinced that the people implementing our protocols would want IETF-developed APIs. This is completely subjective but my own sense is that the #1 problem we have related to open source projects we take years to produce specifications. Melinda