Re: [pkix] Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-pkix-rfc2560bis-15

["Piyush Jain" <[e-mail]>]

> This is what backward compatibility of a standard is.
> A standard is backwards compatible if any valid implementation of the old
> standard is also a valid implementation of the revised standard.

And I always thought that compatibility applies to implementations.

Anyway, I'm pasting David's interpretation of the text that he sent in one
of the messages in this thread. I would appreciate it if you can share you
thoughts on this interpretation.
If this is how most people see it, they would conclude that both clients and
server would need to be updated together if servers start returning revoked
for non-issued. I know that this is not what you trying to convey.
 

Pasted from David's message
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The usual backwards compatibility concern is mixed new/legacy deployments.
In this case, the specifics appear to be:
New clients with legacy servers cannot expect to see "revoked" in this case.
This matters because a hypothetical client coded to depend on a "revoked"
response in this case won't work correctly with legacy servers (even though
it'd be rather questionable to code that dependency into a new client -
never underestimate the creativity and cleverness of implementers).
New servers with legacy clients risk breaking clients that can't cope with
"revoked" in this case, as you noted:"
End
~~~