Re: Call for Consensus: Moving HTTP/3, QPACK and Recovery to the Late-Stage Process

[Martin Duke <[e-mail]>]

IMO the recovery draft is in the midst of a major revision dealing with the
aftereffects of discarding the crypto timeout. Ian still has a bunch of
stuff in flight for this. When all of those PRs land I would like to have a
short period to review the working draft and see if it looks good.

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 7:40 AM Mike Bishop <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I'll also note that it's relatively easy from a spec perspective to allow
> trailers to arrive before the end of the body, or to allow multiple sets of
> trailers to arrive.  I suspect most clients won't process trailers until
> they have the body anyway, but the real question is what clients do with
> multiple trailer sets.  I'm not certain whether that's in our scope or not,
> but that's a separate conversation.  Feel free to open an issue for that
> specific discussion.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: QUIC <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Mark Nottingham
> Sent: Sunday, November 10, 2019 8:01 PM
> To: Roy Fielding <[e-mail]>
> Cc: Lars Eggert <[e-mail]>; IETF QUIC WG <[e-mail]>
> Subject: Re: Call for Consensus: Moving HTTP/3, QPACK and Recovery to the
> Late-Stage Process
>
> Hi Roy,
>
> Responding to the parts relevant to this CfC.
>
> > On 7 Nov 2019, at 5:39 am, Roy T. Fielding <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> >> On Nov 5, 2019, at 5:01 PM, Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >>
> >> Previously, we've moved to the 'late-stage process' documented at [1]
> for the Transport and TLS drafts. The chairs and editors now feel that it's
> time to move the Recovery, HTTP/3, and QPACK drafts to that process as well.
> >>
> >> As before, this is because we're getting to a stage we feel the
> documents would benefit from slower and slightly more formal process, so
> that the rate of change is not so high, changes that do occur are
> well-vetted, and the documents get closer to reflecting consensus in the
> working group.
> >
> > I don't think that process has worked well for QUIC.
>
> Noted.
>
> > There are specific issues that are contentious enough to timebox and
> > conclude, in a formal (and faster) fashion than was done before.
> > That makes sense when needed for a specific issue. I don't know of any
> > such issues for those three drafts. IOW, I don't know of any issues
> > for which it makes sense for the Chairs to pre-empt the specification
> > authors in deciding what can or cannot result in changes to the drafts
> > just because of the timing of when the issue was raised.
>
> You misunderstand the process; the Chairs aren't pre-empting anything, the
> group is attempting to agree to a path to completing this work.
>
> > The late-stage process seems to focus all of our energy into
> > in/out-of-scope arguments rather than actual text in the specifications.
>
> I don't see any evidence for that claim; what makes you believe that?
>
> > The last interim spent easily twice as much time discussing process
> > and process planning than it did HTTP/3. Prior interims were worse.
>
> We spent a day talking about transport and TLS, part of a morning talking
> about planning the future of our work (if you want to call that "process
> and process planning") and the bulk of the (longer) afternoon session
> talking about H3. This isn't surprising, since our goal for the meeting was
> to get the Transport and TLS documents close to finished.
>
> > I don't even recall the last time contents of the HTTP/3 spec being
> > discussed on list, outside of very specific issues related to transport.
> > I would like to see HTTP/3 written with HTTP in mind, not as a set of
> > diffs against h2.
>
> That is by charter; we're largely limited to mapping H2 onto QUIC.
>
> > This is not a small undertaking, but it isn't a massive one either.
> > Basically, import the bits of h2 that are necessary to explain
> > HTTP/3's operation and intent, and then start referencing the
> > http-core drafts instead of 723x. Yes, I know that is risky, but it is
> the right thing to do.
> > And it needs to be done before http-core is finished, since that
> > effort exists largely to place the right content (in the right places)
> > for
> > HTTP/3 to reference.
>
> AIUI that is still our intent, and shouldn't be impeded by the late-stage
> process, since that work should be editorial.
>
> > I have no idea what the status is with QPACK, but we should learn a
> > lesson from the last time and make sure the fixed compression
> > dictionary (if any) is based on traffic at more than one proxy or
> > origin server. Or at least have each of the major deployments generate
> > their local "best" encoding and do some cross-testing of the N choices
> > (plus one or two based on a hand-crafted expert merge).
> >
> > I would like for HTTP/3 to have a mechanism for communicating metadata
> > (like trailers) in mid-stream, both for requests (e.g., priority) and
> > responses (e.g., chained sigs). That has been a design goal for HTTP
> > since 1995 or so. HTTP/1.1 had it, albeit limited to chunked extensions.
> > It has been proposed multiple times and keeps getting postponed
> > because of "concern about scope". This is not a semantics issue (they
> > are just optional trailers that arrive early) -- it is a multiplex
> > framing issue (a new frame type and expectation to process).
>
> Where are the multiple proposals you refer to? We've been working on h3
> now for more than three years. If you submit them now, they'll be design
> issues.
>
> I'd say that the Late-Stage process (or at least the proposal of adopting
> it) is working exactly as intended here -- making people realise that if
> they still have issues / changes that they want discussed, they need to
> bring them to our attention now, not as we go to WGLC.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/
>
>