Subject: Re: LAST CALL: draft-ietf-pkix-cmc-05.txt

From: Keith Brady <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 13:47:18 +0100

"Flanigan," == Flanigan, Bill <[email-masked]> writes:

Flanigan,> Slapping an RFC number on half-baked protocols is indeed
Flanigan,> experimental. So why not make it so (pro-actively for CMC and
Flanigan,> retro-actively for CMP)? And what's wrong with progressing from

I'm not sure we're actually that far from having working interop. Not all
of Bob's report is doom and gloom and we expect better results at the next
one. Granted, we maybe should have started an interop before it hit RFC
(though Entrust and ourselves did do a CCR/CCP) but sometimes we want to
avoid the dev effort in interop'ing standards that are going to change
incompatibly anyway (remember the message body renumbering?)

my 2p's worth,

Keith
--
Keith Brady,                                    Phone: +353-(1)-6054399 
Baltimore Technologies,                           Fax: +353-(1)-6054388
IFSC House, Custom House Quay,                <http://www.baltimore.ie>
Dublin 1, Ireland

---

From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 09:54:45 -0700

At 01:47 PM 7/28/1999 +0100, Keith Brady wrote:
>one.

This is good to hear. However, I understand that the issues are not bad 
implementations, but lack of clarity in the RFC. The reason I brought this 
up with respect to CMC is that we now have a track record of lack of 
clarity getting in the way of interoperability. We should take the 
opportunity to fix it (if it exists in CMC) before it goes on standards 
track. We as a Working Group owe that to the developer and user communities.

Having run many interop events, I can assure you that if you didn't achieve 
interoperability after two concerted efforts, the spec has problems. That's 
why I queried about current implementors of CMC. If there are any, they can 
attest to whether or not the spec is implementable from. If there are more 
than one, and even informal testing has happened, they can attest to 
whether or not the spec is clear.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium