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

[Vijay Gurbani <[e-mail]>]

Dear Michael: Thanks!  Please see inline.

On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 3:16 PM Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> Vijay Gurbani <[e-mail]> wrote:
>     > In the days when code lived at ftp.biguniversity.edu, the Internet
> had
>     > equivalent tools to find it.  Remember gopher(1), and archie(1), and
>     > veronica(1).  They were the github of their days.
>
> No, I was there. They sucked for finding out where the latest patches
> for the foobar project is.  You couldn't submit patches or bug reports or
> anything to those FTP servers.  The code got unknowingly forked multiple
> times.
>

Sure, but those were simpler times, and in their context, the tools held.
I remember when rsync(1) was a wrapper around cvs(1) (the version control
system); collectively it was called rCVS.  It took a bit to get it to work,
but it did work, and provided the illusion of what git(1) and hg(1) provide
seamlessly today.


> I'm not really trying to make a value judgement: just observation.  I'm
> trying to say: if there is a community active around X, then X won't appear
> orphaned.  If there is no community around X... then maybe people voted
> with their wallets (mindshare) already.
> For instance, can you find the latest patch set for Pathalias? (why would
> you care?)
>

Perhaps we don't need to anymore, if Pathalias has been successful.  If I
go back to when we were working on SIP, having some code to bootstrap a SIP
implementation would have been invaluable.  As the protocol became more
important, other high quality  open source and closed source
implementations appeared, obviating the need to have bootstrap code.  But
there is a need for one when a protocol is finding its footing.

Thanks,

- vijay