Re: [Endymail] We're not done yet

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

On 18/11/14 05:11, Watson Ladd wrote:
> Do architecture and requirements documents actually work? Or do they
> end up overcomplicating solutions, as designers attempt to address
> things that maybe should be punted on, as they cost too much to
> implement? They certainly don't help with analysis: the requirements
> documents may be wrong themselves!

Oftentimes, those documents don't work in the IETF, I agree.
This might be an exception, since there are a bunch of folks
who're developing full solutions outside of the IETF and part
of the point of this list is to see if there are things the
IETF can do to help multiple of those solutions. (In the
hope that one of 'em cracks it and would then get sufficient
adoption that it'd be worth standardising later.)

I know Dave Crocker has done some work in this space (and he's
the author of RFC5598 as well) - so Dave, do you think there'd
be value in an RFC along those lines describing an architecture
for a modern secure interpersonal messaging system that could
scale and supports implementations with privacy friendly
features? (I'd like to see such a document myself, but am
unsure if doing one now-ish would be effective or not - we
might be too early or late.)

S.