Re: [Ntp] Murray Kucherawy's Discuss on draft-ietf-ntp-mode-6-cmds-09: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Hal Murray <[e-mail]>]

[e-mail] said:
> I don't think it is fair for you to call this a "switcheroo" without
> appropriate consensus. At this stage, there were a number of folks including
> the author who could live with either Historic or Information, one who wanted
> Standards track, one who wanted Historic, and a few who said "not Historic".
> We have discussed this ad nauseum at this point. I am ready for the IESG to
> provide their guidance on what it should be. I believe there are arguments
> for both Historic and Informational... and many many emails written to debate
> this issue.  

"Switcheroo" may be too strong, but the quantity and quality of the recent 
discussion indicates that something didn't go smoothly.

I think what happened is that most of the reviewing was done while we were 
thinking Historic and we didn't go back and review things again with a fresh 
outlook after changing from Historic to Informational.  (I'm as guilty as 
anybody for not noticing that sooner.)

Who is going to read the final document?  What is the goal?  I think the 
important next step is to get the abstract and introduction to line up with 
Informational.


The original plan was that mode 6 was to be standardized and mode 7 was vendor 
private.  In reality, both are optional and mode 6 exposes a lot of internal 
implementation details.  I'd call it somewhere between semi-standardized and 
vendor private.

ntpsec is a clone of the Mills reference implementation.  We have dropped mode 
7 and added/dropped/changed parts of mode 6 as seemed appropriate.  We are 
still compatible enough that ntpq mostly works cross-platform for the parts 
that both ends support.  While compatibility is nice, I think we would drop it 
if we saw a good way to clean up the code.

I'll send some detailed comments in another message.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.