Re: [Spud] Bare-minimum PLUS (was Re: Thoughts on the privacy concerns expressed at the BoF)

[Tom Herbert <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 5:18 AM, Eliot Lear <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>
> Something that did not get brought up at the BOF is nagging at me...
>
>
> On 7/28/16 8:17 PM, Tom Herbert wrote:
>> The abstraction is only useful up to the point that networks preserve
>> the model. If the network breaks the model in ad hoc ways that forces
>> the application to try to compensate with more ad hoc mechanisms or
>> just stop innovating altogether as we see happened with protocol
>> ossification.
>
> You write that as if it's a bad thing ;-)
>
> Some amount of protocol ossification is a GOOD thing.  In particular,
> the calling interface for transports needs to be stable or source code
> will have no shelf life.  The fact that TCP's calling interface has been
> SO stable for SO long has meant that a large code base did not require
> substantial maintenance just to keep doing the same thing it was
> doing.   I see this as an exercise to determine what needs ossification
> and what does not, and there are extreme positions at both ends.
>
Note that I specifically referred to 'protocol' ossification not
'interface' ossification. In fact, the TCP sockets interface is
constantly being extended. For instance, in order to make TCP Fast
Open (TFO) work we needed to change the semantics of 'connect' call
and allow sendmsg on an unconnected socket.

Tom


> Eliot
>
>