Re: BIND and live property value consistency

On 6/27/05 8:22 PM, "Geoffrey M Clemm" <geoffrey.clemm@us.ibm.com> wrote:

> In particular, the authors of the BIND specification believe
> that the semantics of a live property should be defined by
> the specification that introduces that live property,
> and if those semantics of a given live property are to be
> redefined/refined/clarified, that should be done in a
> specification that obsoletes the one with the original definition.

I have a few random possibilities that might help the WG sort some of this
issue out. Don't take any of these as the chair saying you should do this.
They are just some ideas that might lead to figuring out how to do this.

First, do everyone agree what to do about properties in future specs? I'm
guessing we do but I'm not sure.

One thing I wanted to point out is that an RFC can "update" previous RFC
without obsolescing it. It would be possible to have BIND or bis update all
the previous documents to provide advice on how properties work in the
context of links.

In the glacial time scale that these documents are taking, it seems like bis
and bind will come out at approximately the same time. Would this all be
easier if BIND depended on bis?

The terms "changing the semantics" sounds good but I get a little lost on
what is meant at times. Imagine we have some features of RFC 1000 called A,
then later we defined an extension called RFC 1500 that added a new function
called X. If 1500 added some additional semantics to feature A to define how
it works with function X, that seems all find and dandy. If 1500 redefines
how A works in a way that is not backwards compatible with a client and
server that was written after 1000 but before 1500, this seem like it will
introduce huge interop problems and needs to be considered very carefully.
I'm get lost if we are doing the equivalent of changing how 1000 works or if
we are providing additional information about what you need to do if you do
both 1000 and 1500.

There was a thread were we were trying to figure out how to get each
property to behave. This seems like a really good approach, if we can figure
out how we want them to work, then we can figure out if that is an update to
where they are defined, then we can figure out what document to put the text
it. 

enough rambling, upon more drinking a bunch more coffee, I may realize this
email has nothing of any use :-)

Received on Saturday, 2 July 2005 16:17:19 UTC