Re: [hrpc] I-D Action: draft-irtf-hrpc-political-05.txt

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

Hiya,

FWIW, my impression matches how Ted and Eliot describe NTP
as relatively apolitical.

On 23/09/2019 12:49, Eliot Lear wrote:
> NTP requires only two protocol invariants: the length of a second
> itself and a particular epoch.  

Agreed. And afaik the recent handling of the TZ database
also seems relatively free of politics. (Though I'm open
to correction there as I don't follow the details.)

I guess taking the Devil's (or Niels':-) advocate approach
for a second maybe one could argue that NTP is such a well
deployed protocol that some putative changes to NTP (or
away from NTP) could by highly political, or that the use
of certain servers could be political, but that seems to
be a bit of a stretch to me, as a basis on which to claim
that NTP itself, as a protocol, is political.

So maybe NTP is an example of a protocol that was preceded
by politics, (as Niels pointed out) and that could in future
give rise to moar politics, but that is itself pretty much
apolitical? If that's a good way to describe things, then
it might be worth nothing that kind of example in the draft.

> The one field that has any real
> political aspect at this point is the leap second indicator.

In order to help geek++ the thread: as it happens, I know
someone who generates interesting work measuring those:-) [1]

Cheers,
S.

[1] https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/10061/1/DM-Leap-2016.pdf