Subject: [trill] Charter Revision Implementation Report

From: Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2013 22:06:32 -0400

Hi,

Item "(8) Publish an interoperability and implementation report for TRILL
as an Informational RFC."

Based on the discussion at the meeting, I suggest changing this to

Item "(8) Produce an interoperability / implementation report for
TRILL."

Comments?

Thanks,
Donald
=============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA
 [email-masked]

---

From: Sam Aldrin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 08:12:33 -0700

Could you provide any references of prior RFC's similar to this effort?
That way, WG will be aware of what work is being chartered for.

thanks
-sam
On May 2, 2013, at 7:06 PM, Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]> wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> trill mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/trill

---

From: Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 12:26:26 -0400

Really, I don't see why it should be hard for people to do the trivial
search to find what you are asking, but there are a few examples. The
TRILL WG doesn't have to follow these.

RFC6053 - Haleplidis, E., Ogawa, K., Wang, W., and J. Hadi Salim,
"Implementation Report for Forwarding and Control Element Separation
(ForCES)", RFC 6053, November 2010.

RFC4276 - Hares, S. and A. Retana, "BGP-4 Implementation Report", RFC
4276, January 2006.

RFC4167 - Lindem, A., "Graceful OSPF Restart Implementation Report",
RFC 4167, October 2005.

Thanks,
Donald

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From: "Susan Hares" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 19:42:55 -0400

Sam and Donald:

If you want pointer on the implementation report document, I can help with
it.

Sue 

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
Donald Eastlake
Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2013 12:26 PM
To: Sam Aldrin
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [trill] Charter Revision Implementation Report

Really, I don't see why it should be hard for people to do the trivial
search to find what you are asking, but there are a few examples. The TRILL
WG doesn't have to follow these.

RFC4276 - Hares, S. and A. Retana, "BGP-4 Implementation Report", RFC 4276,
January 2006.

RFC4167 - Lindem, A., "Graceful OSPF Restart Implementation Report", RFC
4167, October 2005.

Thanks,
Donald
=============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA  [email-masked]

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Sam Aldrin <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Item "(8) Publish an interoperability and implementation report for 
>> TRILL as an Informational RFC."
>>
>> 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA [email-masked]

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 May 2013 16:05:35 -0400

> TRILL WG doesn't have to follow these.

While there are some implementation reports published as RFCs, I'd say
they are the exception.

Implementation reports are typically only published when advancing a
document on the standards track. It's a bit early to be thinking about
that for Trill, but in any case, there is a list of implemenation
reports for documents that the IETF has advanced at:
http://www.ietf.org/iesg/implementation-report.html

It is clearly in scope for this WG to do an implemenation
report. Pretty much goes without saying in any WG. (I challenge anyone
to point to a WG that was taken to task for doing an implementation
report when no such item was mentioned in the charter...)

Thomas

---

From: Sam Aldrin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 May 2013 13:45:25 -0700

Thanks, Thomas, for forwarding the link, which is what I was looking for, not the RFC's as pointed earlier. Is it the norm to charter a work item for implementation report in various WG's? I am not questioning the usefulness of it, rather trying to understand the procedure. 

Thanks
Sam

Sent from my iPad

---

From: Linda Dunbar <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 May 2013 20:56:19 +0000

The link has interoperability Reports of those RFCs. 

Is it acceptable to have one vendor implementation report? 

Linda

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 May 2013 17:04:18 -0400

> Thanks, Thomas, for forwarding the link, which is what I was looking
> for, not the RFC's as pointed earlier. Is it the norm to charter a
> work item for implementation report in various WG's?

It's not uncommon, but it's also not a given. Many WGs are not in a
position to do one because the timing is wrong. Many others don't
because there seems to be little interest in actually advancing
documents up the standards track.

Just as a data point, if you grep for "implementation report" in
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1wg-charters.txt, you don't get all that many
hits.

Trill shows up first, followed by:

trill
adslmib
forces
idr
OSPF
rpki
ippm

That's not a lot considering there are 122 WGs.

That all said, what I'd consider the more normal thing to do in terms
of WG charters is to say that the charter item is to advance a
particular spec on the standards track. Doing an implemenation report
is a side effect.

Lots of charters say they will advance stuff up the standards
track. Far fewer actually do it. So to me, it often smacks of a "who
can object?" deliverable for which there may not actually be real
interest/effort.

And to be clear, in the case of Trill, IMO it's still premature to
talk about advancement on the standards track. There just isn't enough
deployment experience yet. So I don't think the timing is right yet to
add that task to the charter.

AFAIK, there are exactly 2 RFC-compliant TRILL products on the market
today: HP (recently announced) and Huawei (perhaps someone can confirm
this is actually shipping now?). There are other vendors with
implementations of some sort, but they do not appear to be in
supported shipping products, AFAICT.

It's also telling that the most recent UNH Trill plugfest only had two
switch vendors (HP and
Extreme). http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130220005196/en/UNH-IOL-Proves-Implementation-Status-TRILL-Plugfest

Thomas

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 May 2013 17:09:46 -0400

> Is it acceptable to have one vendor implementation report?

One vendor product interoperating with itself? That kind of misses the
point.

The whole point of interoperability testing (and reports) is to show
that two or more genetically different implementations interoperate
with each other. That is, the purpose is to show that two different
implementators read the same words in the spec (RFC, not draft, and
not mailing list) and developed implementations from those words that
resulted in implementations that interoperate.

We may think of interoperability testing as verifying protocols, but
testing is actually intended to verify the clarity and
implementability of the published specifications. So that someone else
can also implement the spec and have sucess when interoperating with
others.

Thomas

---

From: Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 13:06:41 -0400

On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 5:04 PM, Thomas Narten <[email-masked]> wrote:
>...

Eight commercial vendors have participated in UNH IOL TRILL plugfests
including the plugfest currently in progress. Of these, four
participated as switch hardware vendors, one as a software switch
vendor, two as test hardware vendors, and one as a diagnostic software
vendor.

Thanks,
Donald