Re: An IETF repository for working code in our protocols?

[Vijay Gurbani <[e-mail]>]

Dear Melinda: Thank you again for your time.  Please see inline.

On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 3:42 PM Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> On 8/20/20 12:28 PM, Vijay Gurbani wrote:
> > So the problem is simple: When we have high quality implementations for
> certain protocols that we standardize, can we come up with a place to park
> these implementations so they can be used by implementers to get a head
> start?
>
> TBH you lost me at "high quality."
>

:-) We can have a gradient measure instead of an absolute measure, sure, no
problem.  "Sufficiently reasonable quality starter code", then :-)

Anyway, I'm still unclear on why this would be a sufficient improvement
> over existing mechanisms (basically, open source + decent search engines +
> WG wiki pages with links to implementations and other resources) to justify
> the effort and possible legal
> complications.
>

Imagine if we told implementers that we know this RFC has an errata, but
with due diligence, please find them yourself.

To my earlier point again, WG pages, WG Wiki pages, datatrackers, all make
sense to you and me.  Not to many people who will like to implement our
protocols without burying themselves deep into IETF lore [1].  When I talk
to developers at companies and students at universities, if they have heard
of IETF at all, it is mostly through knowing that some organization called
IETF produces these RFCs.  That's it.  Perhaps for them that is enough.
And if you buy that argument, then the corollary is that we should do
everything in our power to make sure that they have all of the information
they need to implement the protocol from the RFC itself.

[1] They should, but that is another discussion.  I certainly have
benefited tremendously from my association with the IETF.

Thanks,

- vijay