Hi Melinda,
On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 10:31 PM, Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
I'd like to pick up on just one point here. Why do you think that we already
have too much work? If there is a need for the work to be done, then usually
additional people also come to engage and do the work. If our basic processes
can't scale to higher workloads - as far as post WG review and such, then we
need to improve them - not turn away necessary work.
This is orthogonal to the API question, of course.
Regards,
Alia
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