Re: [MMUSIC] it's time to expel SDP from our lives

[[e-mail] (Dale R. Worley)]

In my experience, there are a number of things that are universally
agreed to be "the wrong tool for every job".  The classical subject for
that observation is vise grips -- and every toolbox contains a pair.  In
software, it's the language Perl -- and every system has a bunch of Perl
scripts that do vital tasks.  And in media protocols, it's SDP -- and
any interoperable system can send and receive SDP.  It seems that
everyone who has dealt with SDP in the last ten years rants that SDP is
horrible, and works on systems that use SDP.

The problem with all of these tools is that they *work*, they can be
used to do whatever is needed at the moment, in a way that is adequate
for the users' needs, in environments where it is quite difficult to do
that.

It may be possible to transition a large section of real-time media away
from SDP.  But the way to argue for that is to present the outline of a
technical replacement, and a roadmap for implementing it in the overall
ecosystem -- including the strategy for interoperating with systems that
use SDP.

Dale