Re: Long time to standard (was: Re: Google, etc, and their proprietary protocols)

[Michael Thomas <[e-mail]>]

On 11/27/20 8:20 PM, Christian Huitema wrote:
> In fact, Google kept shipping successive versions of "Google QUIC" in 
> their products during all these years, progressively integrating parts 
> of the IETF design in their code, until arriving at interoperability 
> with the IETF specification a few months ago, following draft-29. 
> Other companies followed the same pattern, deploying successive drafts 
> in controlled environments such as on an internal "back end" network, 
> or between a proprietary app an their servers. They learned a lot in 
> the process, and contributed to the standardization.
>
> One way the working group dealt with that was by conducting regular 
> interoperability tests based on specific draft numbers, which ensured 
> that some draft versions will be well supported by many 
> implementations. Another way was the support of version negotiation in 
> the protocol. But mostly, the rule was to only deploy interim QUIC 
> versions on systems that supported frequent software upgrades.
>
> I don't know whether this will apply to other IETF endeavors, but it 
> is probably worth documenting.
>
>
DIdn't the same sort of process happen with websockets? Is that back and 
forth really that unusual?

Mike