Re: [TLS] Genart last call review of draft-ietf-tls-tls13-24

[Stan Kalisch <[e-mail]>]

> On Apr 7, 2018, at 8:37 PM, Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> I can't believe the amount of pointless bikeshedding that's already been done over something that's going to be a rarely-if-ever used mechanism for one set
> of hardcore technical developers to communicate to another set of hardcore technical developers.

Not to be too Steve Jobs about it, but I was simply trying to have a little imagination and question assumptions (including my own) about how the size of the developer base could grow, and what that could mean.  So if being thoughtful to the point where one has the occasional slight digression is bikeshedding, that's fine with me.

> This isn't a design for a multilingual IM system with emojis and animated GIFs,

Thank you for clearing that up.

> it's a rarely-used debugging/diagnostic facility,
> and yet we're arguing over whether a developer who can read a lengthy
> technical document specified entirely in US-ASCII (TLS RFC) and implement it in C or Java (US-ASCII, English keywords) will be unable to communicate an error message in anything but Cantonese (or Mandarin, or Qiang, or Kam–Sui, or
> Kipchak, or whatever was meant by "Chinese").

Actually, no, we're not arguing over that.

> Even for the few steps in the process where there's i18n available like the gcc compile stage, the Chinese-speaking devs I know use the English version because they don't want an attempted guess in another language at what the
> error is,

And because they also know English.


Thanks,
Stan