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

[Martin Duke <[e-mail]>]

Put another way, I think Gorry's planned review of draft-24 is probably
premature.

On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 4:42 PM Martin Duke <[e-mail]> wrote:

> 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/
>>
>>