Jack Taylor wrote:
> The move to revise AX25 is hardly new or secret. The ARRL 7th Computer
> Networking Conference Proceedings dated October 1, 1988 has several
> articles on the subject. Terry Fox, WB4JFI authored his proposal in this
Just about everyone since had ideas on how to improve AX.25. But noone
I know of knew that TAPR had something in the works and was astonished
when it was declared the official v2.2 without some RFC process.
> Question: Where and when were the details for Flexnet first made public?
It was also in the late 80ies in Interradio proceedings. But it's not
a question about FlexNet, it's a question of how to set up a
standards setting process!
> Did the Flexnet implimenters coordinate their proposals with the ARRL
> Digital Committee?
Tried to. Gunter has tried to talk to just about every board member of
TAPR both via mail and personally on ARRL/TAPR CNC's just to get
an officially allocated PID for the FlexNet internode protocol, but
it took him _10_ (!!) years to get one when it could have been a
matter of a few mails. That's one of the few positive aspects of
v2.2 8-)
Look, the main problem is not that the spec is bad, that could have
been resolved by an appropriate standards setting process. The main
problem is how TAPR decided to realize that spec. It looks to me that
two guys wrote the spec on their own and TAPR afterwards blessed it,
without ever contacting anyone else that currently maintains an
AX.25 implementation, as far as I know. This just makes sure
the spec will have acceptability problems. Worse, it might induce
balkanization (if anyone will ever implement that spec), especially
as it has some serious backwards compatibility problems.
I just hope we don't run into the same problems as in HF digital.
There every manufacturer has its own incompatible mode. The biggest
common denominator is still AMTOR, which is 30 years or so old.
Tom
