RE: Proposed Resolution to PROT I-D Issues List

["McDonald, Ira" <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>]

Hi,

My apologies to Joel for misrepresenting our offline
discussion and his point of view.  I meant only to
summarize what Joel was trying to explain to me about
IESG policy.

[Juergen - I made that MIB ASN.1 argument offline
to Joel - and was told that the ASN.1 loses and
the plaintext wins - which I utterly disbelieve.
No MIB implementor ever ignored a SYNTAX or
MAX-ACCESS clause in favor of some plaintext.
And certainly no MIB compiler ever did this.]

But this list is still not addressing Hector's real
question, to whit:

Will the IESG allow the NetConf XSD to be used in
the protocol as a Normative _part_ of the incoming 
message validation logic?  

Joel, Randy, Wes, et al - could you please explain
to this list how XSD is useful in NetConf if it's
not Normative?

Cheers,
- Ira

Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI  49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: imcdonald@sharplabs.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Joel M. Halpern [mailto:joel@stevecrocker.com]
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 6:16 PM
To: McDonald, Ira; 'Wes Hardaker'; sberl@cisco.com
Cc: 'Andy Bierman'; netconf@ops.ietf.org
Subject: RE: Proposed Resolution to PROT I-D Issues List


Just to be clear, I certainly never claimed to speak for the IESG.  I did 
describe IETF and IESG practice.

And I certainly never suggested that removing the XSD would in any way help 
the situation.

I objected privately to Ira's claim that making the English normative and 
the XSD informative was indefensible.  He seems to be taking objection to 
my attempting to illustrate other points of view which have a lot of 
history and are well tested in our community.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

At 06:06 PM 3/21/2005, McDonald, Ira wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I've been having a long, fruitless offline discussion with Joel
>Halpern about this.  The results may be summarized as follows:
>
>(1) The IESG policy is that the plaintext English is always
>     normative.
>
>(2) The IESG policy does NOT allow an appendix of XSD (or any
>     other relatively formal language) to override the plaintext
>     English, because then _parts_ of plaintext English sentences
>     or paragraphs might become invalid.
>
>I'm strongly opposed to this logic, because it implies that an RFC
>should not include any formal language appendices, since they're
>to be ignored anyway.
>
>Analogy - In English and US contract law, if an illegal or invalid
>statement is later found, then the clause or the subclause is
>invalid, but the rest of the contract remains legally valid.
>
>I suggest deleting all XSD from Appendices and references.  It
>won't do you any good anyway.  And changing the IESG policy
>is just hopeless.
>
>Discouraged,
>- Ira
>
>Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
>Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
>PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI  49839
>phone: +1-906-494-2434
>email: imcdonald@sharplabs.com
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-netconf@ops.ietf.org [mailto:owner-netconf@ops.ietf.org]On
>Behalf Of Wes Hardaker
>Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 5:00 PM
>To: sberl@cisco.com
>Cc: 'Wes Hardaker'; 'Andy Bierman'; netconf@ops.ietf.org
>Subject: Re: Proposed Resolution to PROT I-D Issues List
>
>
> >>>>> On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 09:03:01 -0800, "Steven Berl (sberl)"
><sberl@cisco.com> said:
>
>Steven> Are you saying that we have a formal language description of
>Steven> the syntax of the protocol messages, but that is there just
>Steven> for information?
>
>My only intent was to state that it hasn't been proven to be perfect,
>and thus implementers should not rely on it as a check that an
>incoming packet is indeed perfect.
>
>The problem I've seen with XML applications is that many of them pass
>an incoming packet to a validator (which is merely validating the XML,
>not the data within) and then doesn't implement its own sanity error
>checking afterward.  Thus, I've actually seen many security problems
>in XML applications because they assume that the packet contains
>everything it needs in the exact form it needs when in fact it may
>not.
>
>Andy is right, however, that an XSD probably couldn't be written which
>meet every implementations requirements.
>
>If you're going to make it normative, I don't think it should go into
>the appendix as it is currently.  (If memory serves, appendices in
>RFCs are supposed to be normative).
>
>--
>"In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap,
>  and much more difficult to find."  -- Terry Pratchett
>
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