Subject: Re: Working documents repository

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:16:03 -0700

*> 
  *> The question then becomes "does it do more harm to preserve this
  *> material than to let it go away?" Personally, I'd hum for
  *> preservation...
  *> 
  *> 
  *> 				- peterd
  *> 
  *> 
Peter,

I have heard several long-time IETFers say that their primary
occupations at current IETF meetings is beating back old bad ideas.
The negative effect of having a WHOLE ARCHIVE full of bad ideas for
people to excavate might be considerable.

Bob Braden

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 16:07:29 -0700

>people to excavate might be considerable.

Bob,

half-full/half-empty.

Having the archive around to document history makes it that much easier to 
utter "been there, chose not to do that".

d/

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Dave Crocker                                         Tel: +1 408 246 8253
Brandenburg Consulting                               Fax: +1 408 273 6464
675 Spruce Drive                             <http://www.brandenburg.com>
Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA                 <mailto:[email-masked]>

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From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:21:18 +0100 (BST)

> people to excavate might be considerable.

Perhaps every expired draft should be replaced with a note saying why
it was a bad idea.

Then at least you won't get old bad ideas recurring as new bad ideas.

L.

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 08:40:33 -0700 (PDT)

> <[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

Hum. The note of explaination might be a good idea.  A number of folks
I respect have told me that it is often a good idea to dust off old, rejected
ideas every decade or so to see if the assumptions behind the rejection
have changed. 

--bill

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From: Peter Deutsch <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 12:06:02 -0400

Lloyd Wood wrote:
.  .  .
> Then at least you won't get old bad ideas recurring as new bad ideas.

Of course you will, it's just that they will be independently recreated!
Actually, I personally doubt that the source of recurring bad ideas is
people reading old drafts. On the contrary, I still feel access to
archives would give us a great line - "That's all covered in the
'foobar' mailing list, go read it and come back when you're done".
Short, simple and if the proposer really has a new insight, they can
couch their argument in the proper context.

				- peterd

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From: Peter Deutsch <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 12:33:12 -0400

Hi Bob,

> people to excavate might be considerable.

But isn't "go read the mailing list" a Standing Order for incoming
newbies? You seem to assume that if late-comers have access to the
mailing list archives they would only extract the bad ideas and not
notice that they were dealt with over time.

I've frequently seen complaints that newbies don't know any history.
Well, if we don't give them easy access to that history of course they
wont know it. Today, as a newbie you have to know which current or past
working group might have dealt with a particular suggestion, track down
the mailing list and bring yourself up to speed. This is not a trivial
exercise, made more difficult since companies come and go, people move
on, relevent mailing lists are lost, etc.

As but one example from my own experience, poor old Bunyip Information
Systems is no more, and although I do know some people took steps to
capture the URI mailing list I don't actually know where it went. So
what do I tell the next person to come along who suddenly rediscovers
the need for URNs? I can't even say "read the list for some idea of what
you're getting into, and then try a self-inflicted liver transplant
without drugs, as this will be less painful". I have to let the poor
souls start from scratch, and hope they've disinfectant to spare...

So all I'm suggesting is that there would be value in:

	a) The IETF hosting the archives for active Working Group
	   mailing lists

	b) keeping those archives around after the Working Group
	   wraps up.

Note that this is *not* a proposal that all expired drafts in the drafts
directory be maintained without contxt. On the contrary, I think the
only access to such expired drafts should be in the context in which
they appeared - the mailing list, where bad ideas meet the light of day,
and alternative liver transplant techniques can be adequately explored.

I also acknowlege that my suggestion might not improve working group
functionality as such, but is seen as an idea that could improve overall
efficiency and provide an demonstrably useful service to people outside
the organization. This suggestion, and a buck, buys a cup of coffee...

					- peterd

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From: Peter Deutsch <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 12:34:55 -0400

Hi Bob,

the organization.

					- peterd

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From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 20:14:46 -0400

Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:21:18 +0100 (BST)
   From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>

The problem is that are infinitely more bad ways to do something than
good ways.  And who gets to "volunteer" to explain why every single bad
idea (such as replacing base 16 with base 36 --- no, that wasn't an
april fool's I-D) is a half-baked idea?  

Or better yet, how about that I-D which documented a proposed IPSEC
transform based on Skipjack which assumed that IP datagrams were never
re-ordered or dropped?  (This was proposed by a Beltway Bandit who would
have manufacturered Clipper chips --- makes you feel good about how our
U.S. tax dollars are at play, doesn't it?  :-)

Sometimes it's better to let a bad idea drop back into the trash bin of
history.....

On the other hand, if someone wants to volunteer to try to document all
of the stupid ideas proposed in the past, that might not be a bad public
service.  I suspect it will be a very long and endless task, though.

						- Ted

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 14:08:54 -0400

I've been watching this discussion and trying to keep my mouth
shut, but I think something important is getting lost.  So,
against my better judgement...

I'd be very enthused about having every Standards-Track RFC
accompanied by another RFC that documents every dumb idea
considered and rejected along the way and why it was rejected.
I'd be even more enthused about requiring, as a condition of
publication, that every Experimental RFC be followed up, within
a reasonable period, by a description of how the experiment
worked out and what was learned from it.   I also think that
finding the resources to get those jobs done and mechanisms for
enforcing the rules (mechanisms that don't cause worse damage),
is, to put it mildly, unlikely.   I'm also not convinced that
the people who produce the _really_ dumb ideas will review the
historical record, no matter how packaged, before suggesting
(and often insisting on) their variations, but maybe that is a
different issue.

However, while the needs/desires of people doing patent
research, and maybe research on our processes, deserve some
consideration, our main job here was, last I checked, to produce
standards and other technical work of the highest quality
possible.   That is usually an iterative process.  To get high
quality, people have to feel free to suggest radical ideas that
might contain elements of high-leverage solutions.    But, if
radical ideas are suggested, it is almost inevitable that many
of them will be duds or worse.   Having I-Ds that go away when
they expire --or at least are not available for casual
browsing-- helps people who want to be able to suggest radical
ideas of which they are not sure without the certainty that
every error will be recorded to haunt them for eternity.  We
have, I suggest, gone too far down the path in which a strawman
idea in an I-D, or a casual and transitory observation on a
mailing list, will return later in the form of a note (almost
always from someone who is not otherwise contrbuting to IETF's
engineering work), that says "you said X two years ago, and Y
now, how can both be right?" (or even "what sort of subtle
conspiracy is going on?").   Anyone engaged in this process has
to feel free to venture an idea, get comments, change his or her
mind, and move on with a minimum of fuss.  By contrast, to the
extent to which we encourage those who want to make that process
as painful as possible, we reduce the number of
possibly-constructive contributions, increase the odds that a
good technical idea (especially one that needs further work by
the community) will never be offered, and generally weaken the
quality of our product.

So there is, IMO, a pretty strong case to be made for:

  -- I-Ds that expire and disappear except for a hard-to-access
historical archive

  -- Copyright statements that, to the extent possible and
rational, permit picking up ideas from I-Ds and incorporating/
morphing them into other drafts (with appropriate attribution),
but that prohibit quotation or reproduction of an expired I-D.

  -- Encouraging those who think that there are good ideas in
about-to-expire I-Ds to move their significant content toward
Informational RFC publication, with critical summaries of why
the ideas didn't move forward as part of those RFCs.  I believe
the IESG and RFC Editor should be much more welcoming of
would-be Informational docs that contain careful critical
analyses than of those that adopt an "we had this neat idea,
look at us, aren't we clever" approach (I believe that, in fact,
that preference has usually been applied correctly in the past).

Let's not bury ourselves in easy to use,
potentially-destructive, archives just because we can.  The S/N
ratio around here is bad enough already.

    john

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 14:08:54 -0400

john

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From: Sascha Ignjatovic <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 20:40:22 +0200 (CEST)

http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/~shri/iPic.html 

The tiny IPic TCP/IPstack

(IPic - A Match Head Sized Web-Server
The chip in the picture above is a complete web-server.
It is about the size of a mere match-head. )

It is based on the world's smallest implementation of a TCP/IP stack --
which is implemented on a small 8-pin low-power
microcontroller .. using a mere 512 words of program ROM. If IPic can fit
in a PIC, it can fit in just about anything. 

The TCP/IP code itself fits in about 256 bytes (12-bit), and the rest is
some extra salt-and-pepper and miscellaneous code. 

   1.The chip is a PIC 12C509A, running at 4MHz (Internal RC clock). 
   2.implementing the IPic tiny TCP/IP stack, 
   3.a HTTP 1.0 compliant web-server, 
   4.a simple telnet server (for editing files on the chip), 
   5.an 24LC256 i2c EEPROM 

This is true real TCP/IP: Despite its small size, this wee tee cee pee is
a true implementation of very carefully hand-packed TCP/IP
stack. Perhaps I dont need to tell you any more than to say that it is
compliant with all applicable requirements of RFC-1122, Host
Requirements Document, the current standard which all implementations of
TCP/IP on all hosts on the Internet are required to
meet in order to be connected to the Internet. 

sascha
ps.as forwarded to me by a friend..

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From: Sascha Ignjatovic <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 20:40:22 +0200 (CEST)

sascha