Re: [quicwg/base-drafts] Normative Text in Invariants (#3773)

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

After discussing this a little more, I have come to realize that most of what you are proposing is covered already - in excruciating detail - in [the manageability draft](https://quicwg.org/ops-drafts/draft-ietf-quic-manageability.html).  Maybe the words and framing are different, and it might be less direct than what you propose, but the important concepts exist there.

What you propose here takes a small step toward moving that into invariants and I don't think that fits with my conception of the document.

The primary function for me is that of a commitment regarding the shape of future versions of QUIC.  That's a commitment that the IETF makes, and given what I know about how good we are at keeping those commitments, that's not worth a lot.  But if we accept the credibility of that commitment, it has value if it successfully constrains future QUIC versions.

Why we do that is in the hope that intermediaries will choose to respect the boundaries we set.  So you are right in calling out the fact that this is the line of tape dividing the apartment in two and the effect that has on curtailing the movements of both parties.  However, I don't want to say much about intermediaries (though some discussion exists in security considerations).

If anything, I would prefer to leave this at something less targeted and more concise.  Maybe the following as a new Section 4 "Scope":

> To the extent that other entities are able to participate in communication between endpoints, a goal of the QUIC design is to provide technical measures that prevent interaction with a QUIC connection by entities other than QUIC endpoints. However, these technical measures are limited in what they can protect and could vary between versions.
>
> This document defines what parts of the QUIC protocol are not permitted to vary between versions.  As a consequence, this also guarantees a minimal amount of information that is made available to entities other than QUIC endpoints.
> 
> Limited interaction with QUIC connections is permitted by entities other than endpoints, such as load balancers or measurement devices, where interactions are expressly enabled by endpoints.

After that, I think we're into either increasing the scope or taking material from the manageability draft, neither of which I think make this document better.



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