Re: [tsvwg] L4S drafts: Next Steps

[Jonathan Morton <[e-mail]>]

> On 12 Mar, 2021, at 12:07 am, Bob Briscoe <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> The concern is requiring unnecessary work to prove things that are "bring me a different rock" exercises.

That does appear to be *your* concern at the moment.  I am merely trying to interpret the concerns of other people for your benefit.  Neither you nor I are the sole arbiters of what valid concerns may or may not exist.  I would however encourage you to consider what I have recently said about "externalised risk"; I can find a link to the YouTube recording of my talk the other day, if that would be helpful.

What I believe David Black is referring to - and I'm sure he'll correct me if necessary - is the (hopefully uncontroversial) notion that a specification is useless if it cannot be implemented, and indeed not very useful if distinct implementations are not automatically interoperable with each other.  This is part of the IETF credo of "rough consensus and running code".

As he explained, it is not necessary for two independent implementations to actually exist for an Experimental or Proposed Standard RFC, so long as there's a reasonable expectation that a second complete implementation is achievable by an ordinarily skilled practitioner of the art (to borrow some patent law jargon).  The existence of *one* complete implementation would, however, appear to be a prerequisite for such a determination.  If such an implementation is open-source and well documented, it's reasonable to expect a second implementer to refer to it in minor cases of doubt - but the major facets of requirement must also be well described in the specification.

I have entirely separate concerns about the specification itself, which I will keep to other threads.

 - Jonathan Morton