Re: Relationship to WREC and extensible proxies

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@akamai.com>]

Hi Mark et al,

I put that out there mostly as a straw man to get people talking openly
about the issues. I've also learned a lot about IETF process, etc. along the
way, which is a good thing.

My sense (I don't want to speak for others) is that it's going to come down
to a division between the three groups, with WREC (or son-of-WREC) taking on
a few things that are of wider interest in the caching community. WREC needs
to focus if it's to get anything done.

Content Peering, OTOH, is a broad topic, and it would probably kill WREC,
unless it were the only topic. One thing that people much wiser than me have
repeated said is that working groups tend to be successful if they're
tightly defined, with a small number of deliverable documents.

As a result, WREC might be best with;
- proxy discovery
- invalidation protocols (perhaps other coherence mechanisms as well?)
- odds and ends (like the direct cache access draft)

All of these are either continuation of caching work, or work that is of
interest to both content peering and caching in general.

This approach would, of course, take some coordination between the groups,
but that shouldn't be too bad, as it looks like there's a fair amount of
overlap in participation.

Whether or not all of CP should be in a single group, OTOH, is a much more
difficult question. Perhaps it would start off as one coordination group,
and break off smaller groups as needed?

Cheers,


On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 11:49:46PM -0400, Mark Day wrote:
> As I understand it, WREC was chartered primarily to produce a taxonomy of
> the problem area, although many people expected that would be only a first
> step before "real work". If WREC is to do more, it must be rechartered. Mark
> Nottingham recently proposed a list of items that could be taken on by a
> rechartered WREC group:
> 
> >* content peering
> >* enhanced coherence mechanisms (invalidation)
> >* log summary formats
> >* surrogate role clarification
> >* semantic transparency issues in intermediates
> >* coordination with content negotiation, other groups which affect
> >   intermediates
> >* proxy discovery (very important, in light of interception proxies)
> 
> There is a sense that content peering is squarely within the charter of WREC
> and thus that it seems odd to propose a BOF on the subject.  Others feel
> that narrowly-focused groups would be more effective than a single working
> group that tries to take on all aspects of web replication and caching (for
> example, there is no longer a single "email" or "directories" working group
> within the IETF).  My opinion has been that I don't mind what organizational
> structure content peering goes into, as long as it can be pursued
> effectively there.

-- 
Mark Nottingham, Research Scientist
Akamai Technologies (San Mateo, CA)