Re: [I18ndir] I-D on filesystem I18N

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 03:41:59AM -0700, Asmus Freytag wrote:
> On 7/7/2020 11:06 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
> > Now, you can you not give a damn and let the spec and running code
> > continue to differ.  Fine.  But why even bother updating the spec at all
> > then?  Who cares what it says if no one bothers to implement it as
> > written?
> > 
> > We're about rough consensus, yes, but also running code damn it.
> > 
> > You can write fiction if you like, but I'm for writing specs that
> > reflect reality and have a chance in hell of improving reality.
> 
> This is an interesting discussion and brings to mind two examples that are
> not IETF standards. One is HTML5 where people got tired about unsupported
> and inconsistently supported features of HTML and are giving the RUNNING
> CODE a much greater weight - even when moving forward. To the point that
> some are dissatisfied that implementations are driving the specification.
> (There are millions of details here that I don't care to tease apart here,
> I'm after a very rough analogy for the purpose of this discussion.)
> 
> [...]

Noted.  The NFSv4 I18N mistake is a 17 year mistake.  We do have a
chance to improve real-world outcomes, but not if we persist in doing
something we know all have and will continue to ignore.  If there was no
chance to improve things, I wouldn't bother, and we could let a 17 year
mistake become a 117 year mistake.

I'm more convinced now than earlier that this should have been a WG, not
a directorate.  Again, expect a BoF proposal on that for IETF 109.

Nico
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