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MOONSHOT-COMMUNITY  September 2010

MOONSHOT-COMMUNITY September 2010

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Subject:

Re: Jabber chatroom

From:

Nicolas Williams <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Moonshot community list <[log in to unmask]>, Nicolas Williams <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:13:29 -0500

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (44 lines)

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 11:42:33AM +0200, Eliot Lear wrote:
>  Hi Nico,
> 
> This is a great conversation.  I want to just comment on one point:
> 
> On 9/23/10 11:08 PM, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> >
> > [*] This is often taken to be an advantage for SASL, but I've never
> >     thought so.  The lack of APIs at best makes it possible to write
> >     RFCs like 4422 that are all English language text, but that's not a
> >     benefit in my view.  Specifying at least abstract APIs facilitates
> >     just the right level of formalism needed to make it easy to specify,
> >     in sufficient detail, how applications use the framework.
> 
> First let's agree that reference implementations and libraries are a
> good thing.  They help interoperability and in general they help
> adoption.  AND let's also agree that standardization of calling
> interfaces is also a good thing, so that code doesn't have to be
> re-invented.  And so really the only questions are WHERE and WHEN those
> APIs should be standardized.  The IETF is not a good place.  There is a
> whole lot of protocol expertise at the IETF and zippo by way of API
> people.  That work has gone on elsewhere far more successfully, most
> notably in ANSI and the IEEE.  What's more, having a clean protocol
> description with a separate API description seems to me always
> desirable, even if the two efforts are linked.
> 
> No, I won't address WHEN only to say that ossification of APIs and
> protocols is different and requires some study.

This is way OT, though I realized that I invited the comment.  I believe
you're wrong about how many "API people" participate at IETF.  In fact,
a great many do.  I would argue that most of the Kerberos and GSS crowd
are "API people", that's a not-insignificant portion of the security
area.  I would also argue that many participants in the PKIX and TLS WGs
also know quite a bit about APIs, since their implementations require
them.  And in the transport area much work has been done on extending
socket APIs (e.g., for SCTP).

More importantly: there is no other place to go to for standardizing
APIs related to Internet protocols.  The IETF is it, flaws and all.

Nico
-- 

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