Re: bettering open source involvement

[Alia Atlas <[e-mail]>]

Hi Melinda,

On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 10:31 PM, Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> On 7/28/16 1:06 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>
>> And there's our problem, right there. Protocols without APIs are
>> pretty much useless these days. IPv6 without a socket API would have
>> been an abject failure. Without RFC 2133, RFC 2292 and their successors,
>> who knows how the POSIX and Winsock support for IPv6 would have turned
>> out?
>>
>
> Not specifying APIs in the IETF clearly doesn't mean that
> there are no APIs, clearly.
>
> I'm certainly open to the possibility that we start tackling APIs
> but I'm not sure it's a terrific idea.  For one thing, we already
> have too much work.  For another, I'm not sure we'd produce
> particularly good APIs. It's a different skill from developing and
> specifying network protocols.  And thirdly, I'm not convinced that the
> people implementing our protocols would want IETF-developed APIs.
>

I'd like to pick up on just one point here.  Why do you think that we
already
have too much work?  If there is a need for the work to be done, then
usually
additional people also come to engage and do the work.  If our basic
processes
can't scale to higher workloads - as far as post WG review and such, then we
need to improve them - not turn away necessary work.

This is orthogonal to the API question, of course.

Regards,
Alia


> This is completely subjective but my own sense is that the
> #1 problem we have related to open source projects we take years
> to produce specifications.
>
> Melinda
>
>