Re: [apps-discuss] unpersuasive advice, was draft-ietf-weirds-bootstrap-00

Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> Mon, 17 February 2014 06:25 UTC

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From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
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Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 17:25:28 +1100
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To: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
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Subject: Re: [apps-discuss] unpersuasive advice, was draft-ietf-weirds-bootstrap-00
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On 17 Feb 2014, at 2:16 pm, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

> I can't speak for the rest of WEIRDS, but in view of what RDAP is and
> the existing prototypes, that is simply not a problem I see any reason
> to care about.  If you want people to follow your advice, you need
> credible arguments about what could plausibly break in real world
> scenarios and reasonable tradeoffs in implementation cost, not
> "because we say so".  We went down the latter road with SPF, the IETF
> best practices from the DNS crowd turned out to be completely wrong in
> that context (something they still don't admit) and I for one am not
> interested in doing it again.

So, you keep on using that analogy.

The thing is, introducing a new RRTYPE has well-understood, difficult-to-overcome operational problems.

However, here your argument seems to be "it's too hard; I want to write a three-line shell script."  Is there more? Because "I have to write a bit more code" is not equal to the fundamental deployment problems that introducing a new RRTYPE brings, not even close.

I think a better analogy is this -- you want to deploy a new protocol over TCP/IP, but for convenience you want to assume that all hosts on the local network ending in ".2" speak your protocol.

When the IP folks express concern about the operational problems this will bring, and the precedent it will set for others, you say "But, the people deploying my protocol will just deploy a new network for it -- it's not a problem!" And so on.

Like all analogies, it'll break down at some point; it's just closer than RRTYPE vs. TXT, IMO.

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/