Re: [ietf-dkim] Working group last call on draft-ietf-dkim-implementation-report

["Murray S. Kucherawy" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Rolf,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rolf E. Sonneveld [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 6:27 AM
> To: Barry Leiba
> Cc: DKIM Mailing List; Murray S. Kucherawy
> Subject: Re: [ietf-dkim] Working group last call on draft-ietf-dkim-implementation-report
> 
> Chapter 2: as for DKIM specific definitions used in this document, they
> cannot be found in [EMAIL-ARCH]. Please add [DKIM] here as source of
> definitions.

The top of chapter 2 contains "[DKIM]" which is the formal reference to that specification.

"[EMAIL-ARCH]" is a general tutorial/overview about email architecture, included to help any newcomers to understand the context of the whole work.

> Par. 3.2 - 3.4: these paragraphs are a bit 'vague', due to terms like
> 'Some implementations [...]', 'Some test cases [...]', 'at least two
> implementations...'. Presumably this has to do with the fact that the
> interoperability event took place long time ago?

The language of that section is just a general description of the participants (the software, specifically) in the interop event and what they brought to the party.  The thrust is actually to show that they were all diverse, i.e. that a number of different parties wrote code per the RFC and then tried to send mail to each other to see what happens.  It would be uninteresting to have 20 parties come together all running different installations of the same package.  Showing diversity in an interoperability report is quite important.

Changing "Some test cases" to "Test cases" seems fine to me.

"At least two implementations" is a specific IETF requirement for an interop report.  I actually am pretty sure all implementations there implemented even all of the optional stuff, except "z=", but I don't have any specific record saying that so I'm making only the weaker of the two statements.

> If so, I'd suggest to
> include a sentence to describe the difficulty to gather all relevant
> information, three years after the event took place. To make these
> paragraphs a bit less 'vague' I would like to suggest to include the
> original set(s) of test messages and the original interoperability test
> plan(s), if still around somewhere.

There wasn't a formal plan.  It was basically "send all your tests at all the participants, then work with each of them to figure out what failed and why".  Each participant brought its own corpus of test messages.

Unfortunately very little of the actual test data and results documentation still exist, mainly because of a promise among the participants to keep the results about specific implementations private.  The public result, appropriately, was the group's evaluation of the quality of the RFC and the published list of errata.

> Par. 4.1.2: [...] Where "list mail" is defined as [...]
> Should this not be: [...] Where "Non-List Mail" is defined as [...]?

Sorry, yes.  Fixed for the next version.

> Murray, thanks for the work!

Thanks for the feedback!

-MSK


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