Re: Experimental (was: Re: homework, not an experiment, draft-crocker-email-deliveredto)

On Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 7:10 AM John C Klensin <[email protected]> wrote:

> With one qualification, it seems to me that it would be a
> legitimate experiment, well within the intent of BCP 9, to
> create a definition this, or more, precise and then see whether
> existing implementations that use this field or ones that appear
> (at least superficially) similar to it evolve to conform.  That
> seems consistent with several of the bullet points in Section 8
> of the document as well.    The qualification is that, while it
> would be interesting to find out if this were the exception, we
> have considerable experience that, if a feature is implemented
> and used by implementations with particular syntax and
> semantics, the odds of those implementations making changes that
> might disrupt existing uses and operations and introduce
> confusion as to whether the "old" or "new" definitions were in
> use is vanishingly small.   Nonetheless, it would be a real
> experiment and it is not clear to me whether the document needs
> additional work to explain that.
> [...]
>

Fair enough.  I don't necessarily object to the use of Experimental, but I
think it appropriate to explain its curious use in the context of a
technique that has existed in some form for quite a while now.   I take the
BCP 9 definition to mean "let's try this" more so than "let's write down
this thing we've been 'trying' in some form or another since the '90s".
Anyone reviewing this later (the ISE, the IESG during its conflict review,
anyone the ISE asks to look at it, etc.) is also liable to trip over this,
so a sentence or two explaining the dissonance would probably help to
smooth its handling.

-MSK

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