Re: [arch-d] on the nature of architecture discussion (was: Re: [Chirp] Fwd: IETF 107 Vancouver In-Person Meeting Cancelled)

Toerless Eckert <tte@cs.fau.de> Fri, 03 April 2020 01:05 UTC

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Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2020 03:05:13 +0200
From: Toerless Eckert <tte@cs.fau.de>
To: Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@nomountain.net>
Cc: architecture-discuss@ietf.org
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Subject: Re: [arch-d] on the nature of architecture discussion (was: Re: [Chirp] Fwd: IETF 107 Vancouver In-Person Meeting Cancelled)
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On Thu, Apr 02, 2020 at 11:58:34AM -0800, Melinda Shore wrote:
> On 4/2/20 11:34 AM, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> > Was it only presentations or also associated drafts ? Was the
> > material asked to be make available sufficiently long ago to
> > allow quality updates be prior review ? 
> 
> Neither, really.  It largely consisted of heated discussions at
> the mike lines.  While there were presentations, for the most
> part they were not architectural in nature (with a few notable
> exceptions).

Ok, remembering some bits now.
That was fun, but yes, not what i was thinking of.

> My sense, from several decades of involvement in the IETF in
> various capacities, is that 1) it would take years to get
> agreement on a diagram of the current internet architecture
> and what you'd end up would be aspirational rather than
> descriptive;

I think we can and are doing descriptive. Most of stackevo
mentioned by you below was descriptive. So are IMHO
many other documents/RFC i would consider to be architectural.

I can think of aspirational as a good and even necessar thing. 

> 2) architectural discussions in the past have
> had minimal impact on actual protocol design;

That is a very broad statement. We should first have an
unserstanding about what we mean with architecture before
i should even ask you to give me example evidence of this.

My architecture interests for example are probably a lot lower 
inside the machine room of the Internet than e.g. the
Internet BGP peering architecure. But all of it is valid
architecture topics to me.

For example, i would consider CBOR an example of an
architcure concept (presentation layer) brought into
IETF and protocols.

One example architecture area of interest for me is the problem that we
are not well enough taking the architecture of routers in to
account for our protocols, or better yet propose to evolve
architecture of both routers and protocols to be better fits in the
future.

I am betting neither of these topics are what you would
have considered to be architecture in your statement... ??

> and 3) complexity
> always wins in the end (the history and output of the NSIS
> working group might be a particularly illustrative example
> of the latter).
> 
> Right now, there is nothing stopping anybody from publishing
> drafts and contributing to (or, indeed, leading) architectural
> discussions in IETF working groups.  I'm not sure what
> inferences we should make from the fact that for the most part
> that's not happening now.

If architecture can be associated directly with protocols
of an IETF WG, then yes, it could and should happen
in that WG, but i think there are more cases where even
this does not happen. E.g.: I have seen ADs eliminate architecture
from charters because it does not produce implementable protocols.

But the more fundamental issue is that architecture mostly
needs to predate protocol development, like research mostly
needs to predate architecture and protocols. I can not
see a logic that argues we must have an IRTF, but we cannot
have an IATF (Internet Architecture Task Force). The
whole construct of IAB for architecture is weird to me.

> I'm skeptical about the actual value of what you're proposing
> but as I said, there's nothing stopping you (or anybody else)
> from starting up something informally, which would give us all
> a better sense of the actual interest level and what the likely
> output would be.

Oh, i think there is a lot of sport in trying to discourage work
that is not officially sponsored by the IETF/IAB authorities
at least from my imited experience.

We need to be darn careful with every single word we
write about a side meeting. Make sure it is called "non official"
every time you mention it, having people seemingly "borrow"
sign up sheets for examination what could be wrong with them,
ending up with concerns of using the same color (!) as "official" IETF
meeting sign up sheets. Dismissive comments about even doing
a side-meeting, Not being allowed to use IETF tooling
like webex, jabber, wiki, etherpad, and so on.  Because using
IETF tools would mean "endorsement of the activity" *sigh*.

This is sad in general, but at a time when it is legally crucial
to make sure all communications is easily recognizeable as
public and published because of the US Govt. export regulations
(see EAR 734.7) it is outright dangerous to make it so difficult
for inofficial side-meetings to use or emulate the
public/published nature of official IETF meetings.

> Also, note that there have been IAB programs like stackevo to
> deal with these questions.

Last RFC published in 2016. Concluded in 2019.
Followup to architecture-discuss according to closing mail.

Cheers
    Toerless
> 
> Melinda
> 
> 
> -- 
> Melinda Shore
> melinda.shore@nomountain.net
> 
> Software longa, hardware brevis
> 




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