Network Working Group Y. Sheffer
Internet-Draft Porticor
Intended status: Experimental A. Farrel
Expires: June 20, 2013 Juniper
December 17, 2012
Improving "Rough Consensus" with Running Code
draft-sheffer-running-code-01
Abstract
This document describes a simple process that allows authors of
Internet-Drafts to record the status of known implementations. This
will allow reviewers and working groups to assign due consideration
to documents that have the benefit of running code and potentially
reward the documented protocols by treating the documents with
implementations preferentially.
The process in this document is offered as an experiment. Authors of
Internet-Drafts are encouraged to consider using the process for
their documents, and working groups are invited to think about
applying the process to all of their protocol specifications.
The authors of this document intend to collate experiences with this
experiment and to report them to the community.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on June 20, 2013.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. The "Implementation Status" Section . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Alternative Formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Process Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5.1. Duration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5.2. Summary Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5.3. Success Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Implementation Status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
9. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
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1. Introduction
Most IETF participants are familiar with the saying, "rough consensus
and running code" [tao], and can identify with its pragmatic
approach. However, there are many examples of Internet-Drafts
containing protocol specification that have gone through to
publication as Proposed Standard RFCs without implementation. Some
of them may never get implemented.
Over time, a variety of policies have been implemented within the
IETF to consider running code. In the Routing Area it used to be a
requirement that one or more implementations must exist before an
Internet-Draft could be published as a Proposed Standard RFC
[RFC1264]. That RFC was later obsoleted and the requirement for
implementation was lifted, but each working group was given the
authority to impose its own implementation requirements [RFC4794] and
at least one working group (IDR) continues to require two independent
implementations.
The hypothesis behind this document is that there are benefits to the
IETF standardization process of producing implementations of protocol
specifications before publication as RFCs. These benefits, which
include determining that the specification is comprehensible and that
there is sufficient interest to implement, are further discussed in
Section 4.
This document describes a simple process that allows authors of
Internet-Drafts to record the status of known implementations. This
will allow reviewers and working groups to assign due consideration
to documents that have the benefit of running code and potentially
reward the documented protocols by treating the documents with
implementations preferentially.
Contrary to proposals to fast-track Internet-Drafts that have
associated source code implementations [I-D.farrell-ft], this
document provides a mechanism to record and publicize the existence
of running code. It is up to the individual working groups to use
this information as they see fit, but one result might be the
preferential treatment of documents resulting in them being processed
more rapidly.
The process in this document is offered as an experiment. Authors of
Internet-Drafts are encouraged to consider using the process for
their documents, and working groups are invited to think about
applying the process to all of their protocol specifications.
The authors of this document intend to collate experiences with this
experiment and to report them to the community.
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2. The "Implementation Status" Section
Each Internet-Draft may contain a section entitled "Implementation
Status". This section, if it appears, should be located just before
the "Security Considerations" section and contain, for each existing
implementation:
o The implementation's name and/or a link to a web page describing
the implementation.
o A brief general description.
o The implementation's level of maturity: alpha, beta, production,
or widely used.
o Coverage: which parts of the protocol specification are
implemented and which versions of the Internet-Draft were
implemented.
o Licensing: whether the implementation is closed source, shareware,
or open source.
In addition, this section can contain information about the
interoperability of any or all of the implementations.
Since this information is necessarily time-dependent, the authors
should remove this section when the I-D is published as an RFC.
3. Alternative Formats
Sometimes it can be an advantage to publish the implementation status
separately from the base Internet Draft, e.g. on the IETF wiki:
o When the Implementation Status section becomes too large to be
conveniently managed within the document.
o When a working group decides to have implementors, rather than
authors, keep the status of their implementations current.
o When a working group already maintains an active wiki and prefers
to use it for this purpose.
It is highly important that all readers of the Internet Draft should
be made aware of this information. Initially this can be done by
replacing the Implementation Status section with a URL pointing to
the wiki. Later, the IETF Tools may support this functionality, e.g.
by including such a link from the HTMLized draft version, similarly
to the IPR link.
The implementation status information must be publicly available, in
line with general IETF policy.
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4. Benefits
Publishing the information about implementations provides the working
group with several benefits:
o Participants are motivated to implement protocol proposals, which
helps in discovering protocol flaws at an early stage.
o Other participants can use the software, to evaluate the
usefulness of protocol features.
o WG members may choose to perform interoperability testing with
known implementations, especially when they are publicly
available.
o In the case of open source, people may want to study the code to
better understand the protocol and its limitations.
o Working group chairs and ADs may use the information provided to
help prioritize the progress of I-Ds in some way [I-D.farrell-ft].
o And lastly, some protocol features may be hard to understand, and
for such features, the mere assurance that they can be implemented
is beneficial.
We do not specify here whether and to what degree working groups are
expected to prefer proposals that have "running code" associated with
them, over others that do not.
5. Process Experiment
The current proposal is proposed as an experiment. The inclusion of
"Implementation Status" sections in Internet-Drafts is not mandatory,
but the authors of this document wish to encourage authors of other
Internet-Drafts to try out this simple process to discover whether it
is useful. Working group chairs are invited to suggest this process
to document editors in their working groups, and to draw the
attention of their working group participants to "Implementation
Status" sections where they exist.
Following a community discussion, it was concluded that [RFC3933] is
not an appropriate framework for this experiment, primarily because
no change is required to any existing process.
5.1. Duration
Given the typical time to produce an RFC (see [stats]), we propose a
duration of 18 months for the experiment. Thus, 18 months after the
date of initial posting of this document, the authors will report on
the experiment as described in the next section.
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5.2. Summary Report
The authors will summarize the results of the experiment at the end
of the period assigned to the experiment (see Section 5.1). If
nothing happens (no I-Ds or only a handful include an "Implementation
Status" section), an email to the IETF list will be sufficient. This
would obviously constitute a failure to adopt the idea and the
authors will abandon the experiment.
If this idea is adopted by document authors, a summary I-D will be
written containing the statistics of such adoption, as well as
(necessarily subjective) reports by working group chairs and area
directors who have used this mechanism.
The authors may then propose more wide-scale use of the process and
might suggest more formal adoption of the process by the IETF.
5.3. Success Criteria
The goal of this experiment is to improve the quality of IETF
specifications. This is impossible to quantify, of course. We
suggest that generally positive answers to the following questions
would indicate that the experiment was successful:
o Did the working group make decisions that were more informed when
comparing multiple competing solutions for the same work item?
o Did authors significantly modify proposed protocols based on
implementation experience?
o Did disclosure of implementations encourage more interoperability
testing than previously?
o Did non-authors review documents based on interactions with
running code and/or inspection of the code itself?
o Did the experiment result in toy implementations, aimed at
"gaining points" at the IETF, or were they real and useful?
6. Implementation Status
This is a process document and therefore does not have any meaningful
implementation status. "Implementation" in the context of this
document means actual program code.
7. Security Considerations
This is a process document and therefore, it does not have a direct
effect on the security of any particular IETF protocol. Better
reviewed protocols are likely to also be more secure.
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8. IANA Considerations
None.
9. Acknowledgements
This document was prepared using the lyx2rfc tool, and we would like
to thank Nico Williams, its author.
10. References
10.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
10.2. Informative References
[RFC1264] Hinden, R., "Internet Engineering Task Force Internet
Routing Protocol Standardization Criteria", RFC 1264,
October 1991.
[RFC3933] Klensin, J. and S. Dawkins, "A Model for IETF Process
Experiments", BCP 93, RFC 3933, November 2004.
[RFC4794] Fenner, B., "RFC 1264 Is Obsolete", RFC 4794,
December 2006.
[I-D.farrell-ft]
Farrell, S., "A Fast-Track way to RFC with Running Code",
draft-farrell-ft-02 (work in progress), December 2012.
[stats] Arkko, J., "Distribution of Processing Times",
December 2012,
<http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/wgdistr.html>.
[tao] Hoffman, P., Ed., ""The Tao of IETF: A Novice's Guide to
the Internet Engineering Task Force", 2012,
<http://www.ietf.org/tao.html>.
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Authors' Addresses
Yaron Sheffer
Porticor
10 Yirmiyahu St.
Ramat HaSharon 47298
Israel
Email: yaronf.ietf@gmail.com
Adrian Farrel
Juniper Networks
Email: adrian@olddog.co.uk
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