Re: [ietf-provreg] a question for the list

[Andrew Sullivan <ajs@shinkuro.com>]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 09:50:53AM -0500, Edward Lewis wrote:
> I'd like to second what Eric mentions here - mostly because he and I  
> have never discussed this in person before.  For the most part, his list 
> is dead-on the same as the one I wrote in my mind recently.

Ok, so I'm picking on Ed's message, but several people responded with
similar sorts of arguments, and one at least said an I-D is
forthcoming.  

Since I'm playing devil's advocate, however (and let me emphasise that
I'm pushing mostly because I think the best way to make a strong
argument is to find all its weak points and press on them), where were
these voices when the protocol was moving along the standards track?
I recall submitting an I-D some time ago that argued for some fairly
major changes, some of which were intended to address these issues,
before any movement had happened.  It seemed to me then (as it does
now) that the time to make incompatible changes to a protocol is
before it moves to Draft Standard, not after it has been declared an
Internet Standard.  So I thought I'd propose a number of changes that
I would have found useful, in the hopes of opening a discussion about
the issues.

The response at the time was overwhelmingly that we had EPP, it was
mostly working, and nobody had the energy or interest to open it up to
make it perfect.  Sure, there were issues, but this was the one we had
and so it would be good enough.  Moreover, some said, any attempt to
add a new protocol would surely, for ICANN-constrained registries,
entail running more than one protocol in parallel, which either means
that you're stuck with the functionality actually available or else
that you have to kludge things up to make them backward compatible.
Finally, there was a side chorus claiming that, given the wide
variation in EPP implementations and extensions, EPP isn't really a
protocol anyway and that therefore "improving" it wouldn't work.

What has changed to make those arguments less compelling now that EPP
has become an Internet Standard?

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.
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