RE: on protocol names, and so on.

["Christopher A. Rath" <car@research.att.com>]

I agree with this.  For any given protocol there needs to be one "owner" of the protocol who provides the specification of the protocol.  Naming and versioning are problems that CORBA had to deal with early on.  One of the nice things Microsoft did was to specify that once you have created a globally unique identifier for an interface, it can not be changed.  (Of course you end up with things like IMyInterface, IMyInterface2, ... IMyInterfaceN, but if an object declares support for IMyInterface, there are no versioning problems to deal with.  If my application uses IMyInterface and a server redefines it, the server has broken the rules and its developers should be flogged and forced to write COBOL for the rest of their lives.  The definition of protocol X version Y.Z should be no different.

Christopher A. Rath
car@research.att.com


-----Original Message-----
From:	Dave Kormann [SMTP:davek@research.att.com]
Sent:	Wednesday, April 30, 1997 7:04 AM
To:	mcp-dev@research.att.com
Subject:	on protocol names, and so on.

this is mostly a long way of saying 'i agree with erik', but:
there's an argument here  that this leaves a big gaping hole if people
have different ideas of what foo 10.3 is.  that's the job of a
protocol registry; we'll want one of those, possibly run by the same
people and with the same procedures as the naming authority.

				dk