Re: [spring] Proposed policy on reporting implementation and interoperability

[Adrian Farrel <[e-mail]>]

Hi Joel,

 

Thanks for bringing this to the WG for discussion.

 

As one of the authors of RFC 7942 I want to comment on the idea of including this “snapshot” status at the time of publication within the published RFC. I think this changes the purpose of collecting the information and making it public. It moves from being information that is valuable for assessing the status of the work, to something that verges on a marketing statement. In particular, companies that are able to get into the RFC reporting their implementations will, forever, be named in the RFC as known implementations, while other companies (perhaps those who waited for consensus before implementing) will be excluded. This seems wrong, and while the text you propose to include might make it clear that it is just a snapshot at the time of publication, it will still be there as a public record. The IETF is not a proxy marketing machine, and this information is not useful for the technical content of the RFC.

 

When we wrote 7942, we thought about this quite a lot. That led us to include:

   Authors are requested to add a note to the RFC Editor at the top of

   this section, advising the Editor to remove the entire section before

   publication, as well as the reference to RFC 7942.

But, at the same time, we described other places this information could be stored and updated, if that is what the working group wants to do.

Personally, I don’t think it is the IETF’s job to record implementation status after publication of an RFC, as this becomes very loaded and commercially sensitive. It could be hard to police, and could become contentious.

 

So, in summary:

- I support the idea of capturing the implementations status of the SPRING work during its development and at the time of publication request.

- I am strongly opposed to retaining that information in published RFCs.

- I support am neutral on idea of continuing to record implementation status after publication if there is WG consensus.

 

Thanks,

Adrian

 

From: spring <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Joel Halpern
Sent: 03 August 2022 15:45
To: SPRING WG List <[e-mail]>
Subject: [spring] Proposed policy on reporting implementation and interoperability

 

SPRING WG:

At the suggestion of our AD, the WG Chairs have been discussing whether it would be helpful to be more explicit, in I-Ds and RFCs we produce, about the announced implementations and known interoperability tests that have occurred.  If the WG agrees, we would like to institute and post on the WG wiki the following policy.  The period for discussion and comment runs until 9-Sept-2022, to allow for folks who are on summer break:

All I-Ds that reach WG last call shall have an implementation section based on, but somewhat more than, that described in RFC 7942 (BCP 205, Improving Awareness of Running Code: The Implementation Status Section).  Authors are asked to collect information about implementations and include what they can find out when that information is available for public disclosure.  Documents will not be blocked from publication if the authors fill in the section as "none report" when they have made an effort to get information and not been able to.

There are a couple of important additions to what is called for in RFC 7942.  We have confirmed with leadership that these changes are acceptable in terms of IETF process:

1) We will retain the implementation status section when the draft is published as an RFC.  In order to do so, the section will begin with "this is the implementation status as reported to the document editors as of <date>"

2) Each implementation description MUST include either a statement that all MUST clauses in the draft / RFC are implemented, or a statement as to which ones are not implemented.

3) each implementation description may include reports of what optional elements of the draft / RFC are implemented.

Reports of interoperabiity testing are strongly encouraged.  Including the reports in the document is preferred.  This may include a reference to longer and more detailed testing reports available elsewhere.  If there are no reports of interoperability tests, then the section MUST state that no such reports were received.

Yours, 

Bruno, Jim, and Joel