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"'EPP Provreg'" <ietf-provreg@cafax.se>
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Andrew Sullivan <ajs@shinkuro.com>
Date:
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:04:47 -0500
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Subject:
Re: [ietf-provreg] a question for the list
On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 07:54:10AM -0500, Michael Young wrote: > can't help but think that if we were talking about this level of change with > DNS, more than a few operators would get very concerned. While I am obviously sympathetic to your argument, using DNS as an analogue won't work: it's too different. The DNS is involved in just about every interaction on the Internet, and it has to be deployed on nearly every Internet node. Moreover, most DNS deployments (stub resolvers) are on the machines of people we have no way of reaching out and talking to. Finally, the DNS is an old protocol in Internet terms, and therefore there is a lot of opportunity for small carbuncles to have grown on it and become part of the _de facto_ standard, even though said growths are not actually found in any RFC. None of those is true of EPP: the community is still relatively small, and because EPP is a two-way protocol with a handshake step and so on, it is possible to warn clients of an impending change to the protocol. While provisioning in the DNS is pretty important, it's not core infrastructure the way resolution in the DNS is, because it's not directly invoked for every Internet transaction. And finally, since the protocol isn't that old, the opportunities for it to have grown significant differences from the RFCs are fewer (and such cases can, in any case, be called errors without causing half the installed base to qualify thereby as "broken"). So, the risk in changing EPP is obviously one of cost and some disruption; but not "time to reformat the Internet", which is what major changes to the DNS might entail if not done just right. In the DNS, there are some pretty big rewards we'd like to go after, but the risk is too great so we don't make the changes. Similar rewards, if they were available in EPP, might be worth the risk. A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@shinkuro.com Shinkuro, Inc. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- List run by majordomo software. For (Un-)subscription and similar details send "help" to ietf-provreg-request@cafax.se