[Old-standards] Re: [newtrk] Re: List of Old Standards to be retired

Eliot Lear lear at cisco.com
Thu Dec 16 20:56:09 CET 2004



Eric Rosen wrote:

> Let me echo Bob Braden's "if it's not broken, why break it?" query. 

Because maybe it is broke.  Even if someone *has* implemented the telnet 
TACACS user option, would a user really want to use it?  The process is 
broke.  We say in 2026 that proposed standards should hang around and 
there is good reason why they shouldn't.  The stuff that does hang 
around falls into three categories:

1.  that which works so well that we just never got around to
     advancing it
2.  that which was useful at some point but is no longer
3.  that which was never useful, and what we really had was a
     failed experiment.

In both [2] and [3] if someone lacking experience decides to 
(re)implement one of these that person is likely in for a snoot full of 
trouble by way of security and interoperability owing to the fact that 
the world has changed since many of these documents were written.  And 
if something wasn't useful in the first place, perhaps smarter people 
than that someone figured out why.

This is a simple way to simply do what we said we were going to do.

Eliot


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