Re: [Stackevo] draft-thomson-use-it-or-lose-it

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 7:46 PM Mirja Kühlewind
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> I agree with the main point this document makes which is only using a versioning mechanism actively helps to avoid ossification. And reading through the doc, I also thought that maybe we should recommend to have a versioning plan while developing the protocol (as you say below is under discussion for TLS). However, thinking further about it and given were TLS is right now, I have the feeling that we really don’t have enough experience to make a recommendation here. So I wonder, should we maybe rather try to just document what we have experienced so far and not even try to give a recommendation, or it that not what we want in the StackEvo program?

Note that this isn't exclusively about version negotiation (though
that is the extension point you most want to safeguard, for sure).
It's more general than that.

The question is the right one though: Can we reasonably publish a
document that lacks really concrete advice about what to do?  The
answer probably depends on whether you think that an answer is
imminent.  Personally, I don't think that the proposed experiments in
TLS will provide definitive answers.  They will provide more
information about that experiment, but not about the problem more
generally.

So the question is whether it is enough to identify the problem and to
provide a general principle.  We did that with path signals and wire
image.  We're still learning about what does and doesn't work with
those, but we have agreed on the principles that we should apply in
those cases.  The same applies here, so I tend to think that there's
value in proceeding, as long as we are clear about the limits of the
advice.

I've tried to proscribe the limitations in another update:
https://github.com/martinthomson/use-it-or-lose-it/