Re: Proposal: A standard EPP OT&E test suite

On 16 Jun 2011, at 17:25, Keith Gaughan wrote:

> A standard EPP test suite from OT&E would, I think, serve two  
> important
> purposes.

IMO, it would have a much more important benefit than the ones you  
list. It would encourage registries to stick to the functionality of  
that test suite and not stray into the world of registry-specific  
quirks and EPP hooks. That would be a Good Thing. OTOH, this could be  
difficult for some registries to do, particularly ccTLDs, because  
local policy and/or legislation requires registry-specific quirks and  
EPP hooks.

> Secondly, it would mean that registrars would only need to run  
> through the test suite *once*, which would greatly reduce the  
> management overhead for both registrars and registries during  
> accreditation.


In theory yes. In reality, perhaps not. For instance, the contact  
object schema for .tel had to be extended to accommodate flags for an  
opt-out from whois. This was specific to the TLD. That sort of tweak  
probably wouldn't be in this standard test suite. Those kinds of  
extensions will sometimes be unavoidable, even in the usual one size  
fits all model of the gTLD world. The E of EPP is a big hint here. :-)

FWIW some registrars initially failed OT&E accreditation for .tel even  
though they'd done that for other TLDs run by the same registry  
provider. I don't remember (and today I don't care) what caused those  
failures. I do recall it was the registrars who said ".tel is just  
like all the other Neustar-operated gTLDs" that tended to have  
difficulties. I don't know if they'd used the supplied toolkits or  
dusted down their own (Neustar-specific?) EPP clients that had been  
sitting on a shelf somewhere. Maybe they just didn't read the  
documentation.

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