Re: Last Call: <draft-housley-implementer-obligations-01.txt> (Expectations of Implementers of IETF Protocols) to Informational RFC

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, 2014-05-11 at 08:31 +1200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Hi Adrian,
> 
> On 11/05/2014 06:34, Adrian Farrel wrote:
> > While I appreciate the effort the author put in to resolve previous
> > discussions, I do not support the publication of this document.

I cannot see the purpose of this document. If it is published and an
implementor does not follow it, what does it happen? Does IETF revoke
his/her license to implement?

There are also phrases in the document that while they are
good-intentioned they make no sense, and an implementor will dismiss the
whole document because of it.

For example: "An implementer should plan to maintain their
implementation."

So if an implementor is under contract to implement RFCxxxx must he
continue updating his implementation even after the contract is
terminated? What does this phrase conveys? Will IETF take care of his
expenses?

At best I believe the document needs to re-purpose itself. 

> I like to think of somebody else: a young programmer working far,
> far away, who will probably never attend an IETF meeting or join
> an IETF mailing list. For this person, we need to state things that
> are obvious to us. For example:
> "It is not sufficient to do an initial implementation of the protocol.
>  Maintenance is needed to apply changes as the come out in the future,
>  especially to fix security issues that are found after the initial
>  publication of a protocol specification."

This document doesn't fill this purpose as it is written as a what-to-do
document rather than a document with advice to implementers. If somebody
has specific expectations from implementers then that should be
reflected in a contract with them.

If on the other hand this is written in purpose to introduce
IETF-certified or IETF-approved implementations it must be even more
precise than this document. As it is, it doesn't fill any obvious
purpose.

regards,
Nikos