Just relaying to the list the comments I made at the mic in the WG session on 
Monday...

I did not agree with any of the four choices offered by the chairs to the WG 
for the resolution of the RFC 7788 / .home issue.

I've spent a good bit time over the past four years helping people try to 
implement standards that we create for technologies such as IPv6, DNSSEC, TLS, 
etc.  Developers often attempt to use the RFCs and many wind up finding it too 
confusing of an experience. A few observations:

- Some developers don't pay attention to (or don't see) the "errata" that 
exists on some of the RFCs. (There was a comment in the room on Monday that 
some views of the RFCs don't make it easy to find the errata - I've not 
explored that myself to confirm.) [1]

- Some developers don't understand how our systems work with regard to 
"updates".  They don't understand that an RFC may be updated by another RFC and 
that update may fundamentally alter the original RFC.

They are generally told "you need to implement RFC <####> - go do it!" and are 
left to figure that out.

In talking to a couple of developers over the years, they just go to their 
favorite search engine, enter the RFC number and pretty much take the first 
link they find (which may or may not be one of our primary repositories).

I think the easier we can make it for developers to figure out how to implement 
our standards, the better the chance for more deployment.  If we want HOMENET 
to be widely used, we need to make the standards as easy to understand and 
implement.

To me that means a couple of things with regard to RFC 7788 and the .home issue:

1. I would NOT publish any changes we want to make as "errata".

2. I would NOT publish a new RFC that "updates" RFC 7788.

3. I would NOT publish a new RFC that is filled with "internal" analysis of how 
the process broke down AND THEN also updates RFC 7788.  (Someone seeking to 
implement the standard is not going to want to wade through the analysis.)

I think the cleanest, simplest thing we can do *for the implementers* is to 
publish a new RFC that *obsoletes* RFC 7788.  We can then promote the new RFC 
as the definitive standard for HNCP.  RFC 7788 can get a big "Obsolete" warning 
in the places we publish it - and documentation and other new RFCs can 
reference the new RFC.

Just my 2 cents,
Dan

[1] I also know that RFCs are sometimes copied to other locations on the 
Internet where things such as errata and update links are sometimes lost.  I 
realize that's not something we can really address - and we can only hope 
developers seek out the "official" source - but that is also a reality.

--
Dan York
Senior Content Strategist, Internet Society
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>   +1-802-735-1624
Jabber: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Skype: danyork   http://twitter.com/danyork

http://www.internetsociety.org/




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