Re: [OAUTH-WG] Mandatory-to-implement token type

[Michael Thomas <[e-mail]>]

On 12/01/2011 06:22 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
>
> > If something is required to
>> be implemented but is unused -- which will happen if the profile
>> chosen by the SDK doesn't need the required one -- you're not going
>> to get better interoperability, you're just going to get untested code.
>
> That'd be a fair point if the MTI wasn't used.
>
> While that might be true of MAC, I doubt it'd be true for bearer,
> which is what seemed to be the thing folks in the room in Taipei
> would pick, had they to pick.
>
> So yes, your argument would be telling if the WG chose a rare
> beast as the MTI thing.
>
>> I don't see what the big deal is about saying that discovery, etc, is
>> for a -bis release of this PS. That would take care of your problem of
>> reaching back into this PS to change just this part. And what are the
>> chances of not having a recycle anyway with any well-deployed PS?
>> Zero?
>
> That's not a reason to not fix an easily fixable thing now though.

What bothers me here is overreach. If the wg has come to the conclusion
that the standardizing the status quo of purpose built sdk's is a Good Thing,
then that is still a pretty good reason to create a standard -- if nothing else,
it dissuades people from badly rolling their own.  Stopping there is ok, IMO.
It still serves a purpose.

Also: it seems to me that the longer term solution for libraries implementing
oauth is not to have a single point of interoperability, but a suite of algorithms/
methods that satisfy the various policies of many/most deployments. That
is, they're going to need to MUST IMPLEMENT a whole lot of things, not just one.

So I just don't see this MUST as doing anything especially useful, and has the
downside of making perfectly reasonable purpose-build SDK's "non-conformant".
That said, I don't think the world will fail to revolve if this goes in there. Mostly,
I think that it will be ignored. But that's what bothers me: putting stuff in that
you know will be disregarded with impunity is not good.

Mike, listening to Ken Burns' Prohibition in the background