Subject: [weirds] Conformance - Re: Review of draft-ietf-weirds-rdap-query-13

From: Edward Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:25:14 +0000

(Soapbox:)

“Conformance” is a slippery slope issue.  What John said is appropriate - as
long as an implementation can express “I don’t do that” and the other side
can cope one can consider the job of accomplishing interoperability
complete.  I’ve preferred that an implementation be able to claim
“implements RFC wxyz” and leave the issue of conformance up to the
buyer/seller of services that are composed from, among other items, the
implementation.

Through the years I’ve spent time trying to declare whether a service or
module “conforms” to an RFC and came away with the lesson that “conformance”
is a legal term and not a technical term.

So - I would not fret too much about defining conformance to be too loose or
too strict.  Leave that to a test harness/tool.  Permit the implementer to
write code that “make sense.”  I understand we don’t want to write a
specification that is so weak that even the ‘ls’ command can claim
compliance, but the way RFCs have been written historically, they assume
that the developers have best intentions when it comes to providing
functionality.

From:  <Hollenbeck>, Scott <[email-masked]>
Date:  Monday, September 22, 2014 at 7:00
To:  "Murray S. Kucherawy" <[email-masked]>
Cc:  "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Subject:  Re: [weirds] Review of draft-ietf-weirds-rdap-query-13

[SAH] That’s specific to search behavior, but the text Alex is suggesting
leaves open the possibility of leaving out other features, too. So where do
we draw the line? Does an implementation that provides (for example) domain
name lookups and nothing else “conform”? I’m not comfortable with referring
to existing WHOIS behavior as a guide because exceptions can be found to
support pretty much any position.