[ih] Who owns old RFCs ?

[Scott O. Bradner]

I recall that the IETF had a BOF on the topic of conformance testing - (I do not remember when _ the idea was pushed
by some company that did that sort of thing as well as some people in one of the telecom SDOs - the 
concluding was quite clear that interior texting fixed the issues that needed to be fixed to make things work
and conformance tested different interpretations of a standards document (X.400 being the poster kid)

Scott

> On Apr 24, 2020, at 5:14 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
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