Re: Loops (RE: CPIM changes)

Adam,


Friday, November 15, 2002, 1:28:58 PM, you wrote:
Adam> I'm a little confused about the discussion of gatewaying between
Adam> heterogeneous protocols (which, if I'm not mistaken, is to meant
Adam> to denote "legacy" P&IM protocols). It seems to be completely out
Adam> of scope for the work that IMPP has been chartered for.

There is a very basic disconnect between what most people in this group are
trying to do versus how the CPIM effort came about, what it was intended to
do. But then, that's not surprising since we have so little continuity in
this group and the new task was never formally chartered. Still, I must admit to
finding it odd to have a number of people state so firmly what the history
and goal of the group of nine was.

At any rate, Adam, your summary looks quite reasonable, but it is not what
happened:

Adam> To my understanding, IMPP got where it is now through a series
Adam> of events along the lines of:

Adam>  - The IETF forms a WG to define Presence/IM protocols

Adam>  - The WG spends several meetings trying to agree on transport
Adam>    mechanism

It spent 2 years, not 1.


Adam>  - Consensus never arrives, so the "council of nine" is formed to
Adam>    make a recomendation for a way forward

Because the group had taken so long and made no progress, the area directors
suspended work in the group until concrete protocol specs were produced. 3
serious drafts and a couple of pseudo-drafts were proffered.

THEN there was an attempt to reconcile, or choose a single winer, but it
failed. It failed quickly because the history of the working group had
already shown an inability to reconcile differences.

The group of nine was commissioned to specify a common gateway semantic.
That is all. Not a protocol. Not a content syntax. But rather the minimum
acceptable gateway functionality that could pass muster among the group of
nine.

The idea behind the message format spec was to provide common content
semantics, not an end-to-end specification.  However it was obvious -- and
frankly intended -- that anyone actually using the format directly would
greatly enhance the potential for end-to-end content preservation.

Over time, folks have forgotten the intended goal and have, instead, turned
this into yet another effort to do an end-to-end common im&p protocol. After
all, the IETF does protocols and almost never specifies gateways. So trying
to do a protocol is natural. Except that that was not the goal of CPIM.

So if the IETF does not do gatewaying much, why did we attempt it for CPIM?
Well the only reason a couple of us thought this was a reasonable task was
that we had a fair amount of experience doing it for email and IM is
similar.  Gatewaying Presence turned out to be trickier.

To the extent anyone cares whether there is a reason I have gotten so
strident, it is because the group is doing a good job of ignoring any
history concerning gatewaying. Instead what is now quite clear is that the
deeper problem is not even understanding that that is what CPIM was for.

So we get a "I prefer homogeneous" kinds, as if this were a popularity
contest.

It really would be simpler and more consistent to re-name the working group
to something like "Content Formats for SIMPLE", since that is what the
effort has become.

d/
-- 
 Dave Crocker  <mailto:[email protected]>
 TribalWise <http://www.tribalwise.com>
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