[ietf-dkim] 1193 considered harmful

[Mark Delany]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 10:46:51PM +0000, Stephen Farrell allegedly wrote:
> >I'm far from convinced that _any_ permutation of this is worth breaking
> >backward compatibility. None of the reasons you gave seem compelling to
> >me. 
> 
> That's a fair position. Others may disagree, equally fairly.

I'm not sure I see why backward compatibility is such a big deal for
the email headers.  There is a vastly larger deployment of DK and in
spite of that, changes that broke DK headers where knowingly made in
the evolution of allman-01 - even though one of the stated goals was
the same as the DKIM charter - to try and be compatible.

Now that there is a tiny set of experimental implementations and
deployment of allman-01, suddenly header incompatibility is more
important?  I don't buy the distinction as rationale against this
change or any other header change for that matter.

In fact, as I recall at the Cisco DKIM summit, the recommendation for
those wanting to experiment with implementations now was to use
allman-01 as the draft was expected to be in a state of flux and have
a number of further refinements over coming versions. In short,
everyone was expecting that it would change as the WG moved focus from
threats to base.

I agree with Barry that the main compatibility leverage we can make is
to Selectors deployed by the 10,000 or so domains that do DK signing.


Mark.