Re: draft-ietf-httpbis-jfv: what's next

[Willy Tarreau <[e-mail]>]

Hi Julian,

On Thu, Oct 06, 2016 at 03:16:34PM +0200, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Now we can't have these specs rely on an abandoned Internet Draft, right?

No I disagree with you here. Drafts are drafts. They always have early
adopters (otherwise they don't make progress), but early adopters know
what risks they are taking. Otherwise you end up censoring yourself when
writing a draft just in case someone would implement it, which is not
acceptable at all.

> So what do we do?
> 
> a) "finish" draft-ietf-httpbis-jfv, documenting known issues, and publish
> this as informational or experimental?

It could be an option at least not to lose all the work done on this and
to serve as input for future designs (specifically the known issues). But
I don't know if that requires lots of work on your side or not. It could
end up like those few RFCs saying "foobar considered harmful", documenting
a design choice and its impacts and side effects.

> b) conclude work on this draft, and let me continues to finish my pre-WG
> draft (with the same goals as above)
> 
> c) give up, and let the users of the draft figure out a solution?

Well these two ones are not exclusive of the first one. If it is possible
to "flush the pipe" with option a) without spending too much effort on it,
the lowest the effort, the highest c) becomes prevalent. And in all cases,
b) definitely is up to you (I think).

Maybe the draft should be renamed to something like "The limitations of
using JSON for header field values" or something like this, explain the
design, the fact that there are known adopters, and enumerate the known
issues without too much details (just to discourage future adopters unless
they're fine with these limitations).

Just my two cents,
Willy