Subject: [dix] So what went wrong?

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 12:04:56 -0600

My biased, personal, quick-shot-from-the-hip diagnosis (and I'd love  
to hear different views):

-- The problem was not made clear -- too much apple pie, too little  
slicing; 
too much focus on individual requirements and not enough on the big  
picture.

-- The Web 2.0 use case (titled "blogosphere") was foreign to much of  
the audience.

-- There was no attempt made at a convincing case that existing stuff  
does not cut it on its own.

-- The organization of the BOF succumbed to early derailing attempts,  
so not enough of the substance was actually presented -- it was not  
possible to establish enough common ground for reasonable discussion.

-- The whole time, apart from the many interested spectators, there  
were two fractions: 

1) people who think in terms of a different problem space, already  
know the solutions for that and somehow are confident that the (not  
very clear) problems at hand can be solved with these as well, and

2) people who think in term of the DIX problem space but were  
inhibited from talking about how their solutions have significantly  
different properties from the Enterprise ones.

In the end I felt like I sat in a BOF trying to sell SMTP to an X.400  
crowd (and yes, I'm old enough to have been there).

Gruesse, Carsten

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From: "Michael Slavitch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 13:18:52 -0500

Come to the P2PSlP BOF. You will feel  welcome.
Find me and ll'll explain.

-----Original Message-----
From: Carsten Bormann [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tue 21/03/2006 1:04 PM
To: Digital Identity Exchange
Subject: [dix] So what went wrong?

Gruesse, Carsten

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 14:47:08 -0600

Interesting list.

Carsten Bormann wrote:
> My biased, personal, quick-shot-from-the-hip diagnosis (and I'd love to 
> hear different views):
> 
> slicing;too much focus on individual requirements and not enough on the 
> big picture.

yes, though it was perhaps a bit more nuanced, because there was in fact some 
big picture. However I think it was not the right kind to be effective for this 
audience.

> -- The Web 2.0 use case (titled "blogosphere") was foreign to much of 

I did not see this case as causing anyone heartburn.  So I can't guess what you 
saw that prompts this assessment.

> does not cut it on its own.

Agree.

> -- The organization of the BOF succumbed to early derailing attempts, so 
> not enough of the substance was actually presented -- it was not 

Disagree.

First, I saw very minor efforts to "derail", where I only count "stop the DIX 
effort" in that category.

What I and others did attempt was to re-organize the focus, to deal with the 
concerns that many in the audience found higher priority, and therefore attempt 
to make the BOF productive.  Those of us expressing this difference in 
priorities have been doing IETF work long enough to believe we have some 
understanding of how to fail and how to succeed within the IETF.  For some of 
us, knowledge about how to fail entails very deep expertise, engendering a 
strong desire to spare that pain for the next guy...

At any rate, this was *not* derailing.  Rather, it is adapting to the audience, 
and since support of the IETF community is presumably the goal, then the 
preferences and needs of the IETF audience ought to be heeded.

> -- The whole time, apart from the many interested spectators, there were 
> two fractions:
> 1) people who think in terms of a different problem space, already know 
> the solutions for that and somehow are confident that the (not very 
> clear) problems at hand can be solved with these as well, and
>
> 2) people who think in term of the DIX problem space but were inhibited 
> from talking about how their solutions have significantly different 
> properties from the Enterprise ones.

You left out the faction that I believe was dominant in the group:  People who 
believe this is a very important problem space but a) do not see the seeds of 
success in DIX, yet, and b) want to fix a).

> crowd (and yes, I'm old enough to have been there).

Excluding the few loud voices that expressed religious preference for some 
"established" solutions, I do not believe any of the active critics qualify for 
this model.

It was, I think, more like trying to have an engineer sell a product to an 
end-user.  There was a complete mismatch of agendas and (in some sense) skills.

d/
-- 

Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
<http://bbiw.net>

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From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 21:13:55 +0100

> crowd (and yes, I'm old enough to have been there).

Ahem, well, more like beeing in the room trying to sell LDAP to X.500.

Why I hear you say?

I wasn't around when LDAP split off from X.500 but I was around a
couple of years later (and ever since) in the IETF. The BOF felt
like deja-vue all over again for me.

In the dawn of time (smoke, also sprach zarathustra) the LDAP founding
fathers sat down and said "this X.500 directory stuff is far to complex.
Let us build a more simple directory".

They went about building LDAP. LDAP became a big hit and attracted
actual users and with them work in the IETF on all kinds of extensions,
profiling etc etc.

During the course of that work, and work on bringing LDAP to draft
standard, it has become increasingly clear to those of us who came
after the mythical progenitors of LDAP that some of the very choices
that were made when adding the 'L' to 'DAP' (X.500 includes DAP which
is the protocol for accessing an X.500 directory) were very very bad
choices.

Einstein once said - make things as simple as possible but no more
simple than that.

History has shown that it was possible to simplify X.400. Hence 821,
822,2821,2822 etc etc.

History has also shown that LDAP was probably too simple. That is not
to say that X.500 is the most simple directory model. I am saying
that the obvious choices 'simplifying' a design aren't necessarily
the right ones.

A couple of lessons from the LDAP/X.500 (imvho as always):

- - Simple doesn't necessary mean less code, text-based rather
  than 'binary' protocols, etc. The fact that you can debug your
  protocol by looking at tcpdump traces should not influence
  your design too much.
- - Non-structured as opposed to structured (ASN.1, XML, etc) data
  is a non-issue. One of the major simplifications of LDAP was
  the choice to only support text-based attribute values. That
  is one of the major problem with LDAP today.
- - Don't make design choices before fully understanding other
  solutions even remotely in the same space.

My 2 cents.

	Cheers Leif

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From: David Boreham <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:38:24 -0700

>  protocol by looking at tcpdump traces should not influence
Of course LDAP is a purely binary protocol, and some of us have made a nice
living debugging the encoding/decoding code for it ;)

An available text-based variant (DSMLv2) has approximately zero 
deployment footprint.

OTOH the text based protocol argument worked well in the case of
SOAP/XML-RPC.

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From: Pete Rowley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:57:25 -0800

>  protocol by looking at tcpdump traces should not influence
Simple in the LDAP sense most certainly does mean less code, where it 
counts, in the client.

>  is one of the major problem with LDAP today
>
;binary?  In any case, I think the text based attribute values helped 
fuel adoption and to a certain extent narrowed focus and expectations.

>.
Agreed.

Whether you believe LDAP was too simple or not, I think it can be agreed 
that whatever it did, for good or bad, it got deployed widely.  In the 
absence of LDAP I don't think x.500 would ever have achieved the same 
ubiquity.  DIX has similar goals, simplify where it counts, make it 
deployable in a larger scope than current offerings.

-- 
Pete

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From: Nicolas Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:57:56 -0600

> OTOH the text based protocol argument worked well in the case of

When I look just at specs, never mind actual protocol traces, I find
that wading through a bunch of XML is almost as hard as looking at XDR
encoded data (I've had fun debugging ONC/RPC protocols).  Now, BER/DER
are definitely less fun still, but thinking of XDR as a 4-octet aligned
subset of PER I would go out on a limb and say that looking at traces of
PER-encoded data wouldn't be so bad.  (And then you have to encrypt the
traffic...)

But then, with extensible protocol decoders, such as ethereal, does this
matter anymore?  I'll go out on a limb and say "no."  When implementing
a new protocol one should also implement dissectors for traces of it
too, just as one should implement test suites for new software.

Oh, let's not have the encoding argument again.  We have enough standard
and ad-hoc encodings already, and I bet there will always be someone
left who is not satisfied with existing choices.

Nico
--

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From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:00:46 +0100

> OTOH the text based protocol argument worked well in the case of

My point is that no-one (going far out on the limb here and bringing
a saw) will develop serious applications using LDAP *or* DSMLv2 without
the use of a library implementing the marshalling/object encoding.

- From an application-implementation standpoint this means that the
choice of ASN.1 vs DSML vs XML vs YAML vs FOO is all about "Sure
fine whatever but where is my toolkit?!".

The SAML community would (beginning to saw into the limb) probably
have seen a much larger deployment of their stuff if there had been
a php implementation :-)

	MVH leifj

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From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:06:05 +0100

> Simple in the LDAP sense most certainly does mean less code, where it

Measured how exactly?

> fuel adoption and to a certain extent narrowed focus and expectations.

Not ;binary - thats details. It did lower expectations but clearly
didn't  narrow focus. LDAP is beeing used for much more than X.500 was
ever intended to be used for and I claim that many of these applications
are today feeling the lack of structured data in attribute values
(to pick one simplification of LDAP).

> deployable in a larger scope than current offerings.

And I am trying to put it across to the dix community that there is
value in simplification but not in over-simplification. LDAP did not
represent the optimal simplification. Learning from LDAP (and similar
cases) might help dix achieve wide deployment *and* long life.

	MVH leifj

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From: Pete Rowley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:21:39 -0800

Leif Johansson wrote:

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>
>
>  
>
I don't want to bog down this list with this, so I'll just say that 
client responsibilities are much lower in LDAP than in x.500.

>cases) might help dix achieve wide deployment *and* long life.
That is noted :)  I was just making the point that simple but widely 
deployed is sometimes (usually?) better than complex and not widely 
deployed.  Even if down the road you may need to revise some things to 
address new areas of interest, at least you have something to do it with.

-- 
Pete

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From: John Merrells <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 03:12:35 -0600

My god... this thread has turned into an 'Alan Lloyd' experience... (*)

John

* You'd have to have been on the ldap lists in the late 90's to  
appreciate
that, but there were endless endless endless threads about the wonders
of ASN.1 and jet planes with wooden propellers and all manner of mangled
metaphors.