[ih] Who owns old RFCs ?

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 25-Apr-20 08:49, Bernie Cosell via Internet-history wrote:
> On April 24, 2020 15:55:04 Dan Lynch via Internet-history 
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> Back in the 80s I created Interop so vendors could demonstrate compliance 
>> with the IETF RFC standards. The idea of a testing institute to ensure 
>> compliance was floated and found too burdensome by everyone so public 
>> demonstrations became the efficient way. Our motto became “I know it works. 
>> I saw it at Interop!”  Of course there was months of voluntary testing at 
>> my lab in Sunnyvale that preceded the public demonstrations at Interop. 
>> Self interest motivated every one.
> 
> doesn't that run into the n² problem?  if you had an effective compliance
> test it would be an o(n) problem, but for interoperability testing it is
> an o{n²) matter.  if you have, say, 12 vendors you'd have to 12 compliance 
> tests
> but 66 interop tests.
> 

Correct. But that's exactly what Interop did - all 66 tests just happened
on the show net, and the bugs that mattered popped up, without any need
for systematic procedures.

On 25-Apr-20 08:06, John Day via Internet-history wrote:

> Be careful. ;-) There is a difference between interoperability and conformance. One can have interoperability without conformance. In fact, that is probably what is happening now.

True. But bugs that don't matter for interop probably don't matter anyway.

Also, it seems to me that truly obnoxious bugs such as race conditions
are more likely to be found in random n² testing than in planned
1-on-1 conformance testing.

    Brian