The MPLS-OPS Archive

[Roger Clark Williams <rogerw@nordlink.com>]

Good clarification, Matthew, thanks.

Roger Williams


At 12:07 PM 7/13/2002, you wrote:
> > Roger Clark Williams <rogerw@nordlink.com> [Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 
> 07:27:38PM -0400]:
> >Sameer, I had a Worldcom guy in a class once (will I ever again?) and we
> >had a nice back-and-forth on the subject of standards: If a company only
> >supports a subset of an RFC or an IEEE standard, is that company complying
> >with the standard? His argument was no, mine was yes. There is no right or
> >wrong answer here.
>
><snip>
>
>First, let me say that as long as an implementation satisfies the
>requirements behind the decision to use a standard, then the question
>of whether or not an implementation actually complies with the
>standards, or not, is irrelevant.  For example, if a standard is
>adopted exclusively to promote interoperability, and an implementation
>is 100% interoperable with all past, present, and future compliant
>implementations, then it doesn't matter whether the implementation
>is actually compliant with the standard or not.  The goals specified
>when adopting the standard have been achieved.
>
>Having said that, there _is_ a right or wrong answer when it comes
>to determining whether an implementation is in compliance with a
>standard: if an implementation conforms with all of the "required"
>elements of a standard (the MUSTs and MUST NOTs, for IETF standards),
>then it is in compliance; otherwise, it is not.  So, if a company
>supports only a subset of a standard, then whether it is in compliance
>with that standard, or not, depends on which subset is supported.
>
>mrr
>
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