Subject: Re: [alto] Request for comments on two changes for RFC7285-to-be

From: Wendy Roome <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 12:37:56 -0400

> There are two reasons for E1 and E6:
>  
> (1) Make the document consistent. Specifically, the first paragraph of Section
> 11.4.1 states that "An endpoint property resource provides information about
> properties for individual endpoints.  It MAY be provided by an ALTO server."
> Without E1 and E6, the document will imply that at least one endpoint
> properties service (i.e., one to provide pid) must be provided. Hence, one way
> to achieve consistency is to change the MAY in the first para of 11.4.1 to be
> MUST.
> 
> (2) However, some authors feel that we should not enforce too strong a
> requirement to make deployment harder. Hence, instead of changing the
> aforementioned MAY to MUST, these authors feel that it is better to make the
> pid endpoint property optional. Hence, we make the two changes of E1 and E6.

I vote to make the ³.pid² property (and EPS) optional.

The pid property is a useful shortcut, and I think most servers will provide
it. But a client can get that information from the network map, so it¹s not
necessary. Hence I don¹t see why we should force a server to provide it if
the server¹s provider doesn¹t see a need for it.

BTW, the rfc-to-be also says that a server MUST provide full network map and
cost map services. So under the current RFC, an ALTO server that only
provides an Endpoint Cost Service would be illegal.  The server could become
compliant by offering a trivial 1-pid map, of course. But that¹s silly.

No, I¹m not suggesting that we revise the RFC to make the network map & cost
map  services optional. Too late for that! But I suspect future extensions
will remove those requirements. So I don¹t think we should add any more
requirements now.

- Wendy Roome