Re: [Add] My principles for discovery

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

> Il 27/03/2020 01:44 Martin Thomson <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
> See, I think that this line of argumentation is firmly out of scope for this group.  I think that it is fine to express your opinions about what policies a client might consider as valid, and to factor those things you identify into how those opinions are formed, but this group is setup specifically not to contemplate that.  Finding ways to express how those opinions manifest within the scope of this group's charter is what we need to try to do.  Which is awkward, but thank you for doing that here:

I don't disagree, but the problem is that discovery mechanisms are a tool to implement deployment models, which shape their requirements. But deployment models have policy consequences, some intended and some not, which once understood lead to adding features and fixes to them, which in turn need to be supported by the discovery mechanism.

So the logical order to proceed would be to imagine a deployment model, to discuss collectively its policy implications, to come to reasonable bottom-up agreement (or final disagreement) on possible mitigations, and then to design and implement a discovery mechanism that supports all that. But we cannot do that because we don't have a venue for policy discussions, and even if we had it, the discussion would take much longer than agreeing on technical specs, and could fail altogether.

So, I agree that this is not the right venue for that, but I do think that some policy discussion now, even if hard, would save us much bigger arguments later, especially with people outside of this process.

Also, we might think that we may solve the issue by designing such an open, general and extensible discovery mechanism that it can support each and every conceivable deployment model. However, that could just be wishful thinking, and it might also set the group for a very long technical odyssey before getting anywhere.

> That's the careful balance this group has: we can't talk about policies because we know we don't all agree.  But we really need to understand whether there is some motivation for doing the work that is at least plausible.
> 
> This is likely a question for chairs, but if we want to avoid the policy discussions, maybe they would prefer to say that as long as there is sufficient interest then work might proceed rather than trying to avoid objections.  Or at least avoiding objections on policy grounds, because there are objections that are in scope and derive from things outside of the contested policy questions.

A "live and let live" principle could be good: different sub-groups could work on different discovery mechanisms that suit different deployment models, which will all be standardized provided that they are technically sound.

However, I do see a problem: can you really tell technical objections from policy objections? People that don't like other people's deployment models might start to claim that their objection is technical and thus in scope. The first example I can think of: there are people that would like to just add a new option to DHCP and advertise their DoH/DoT resolver there, as they think that the level of security provided today by DHCP is sufficient; others think that this would be too insecure, and object to that mechanism on those grounds. Is that a technical or a policy objection?

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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