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aanchal4 / draft-roughtime

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Coexistence and update path form older versions #16

Open nunojpg opened 5 years ago

nunojpg commented 5 years ago

Hi,

Considering the protocol would be approved as-is in the IETF draft, and that at least the MIDP format is incompatible with current de-facto roughtime, what would be the update path?

Will the current servers (eg. roughtime.cloudflare.com:2002) honor the current format for long? The answer will depend on the request? Simultaneous server URL will be provided for the existing and new version?

Thanks!

dansarie commented 5 years ago

My thoughts: Incompatible protocol changes is one of the risks with using a protocol where the specification is in the early-draft stage. I would expect those running servers to specify which version of the draft they are running somewhere. I don't think Cloudflare does so anywhere, but I think its draft-00 (@wbl can probably answer). In the case of the server I manage, it's specified on its homepage (https://roughtime.se). Providing different versions on different servers or ports would be one solution during development.

There is currently no difference between the client requests in the different versions of the draft, so servers have no way of knowing which version a client supports.

Clients that wish to distinguish between draft-00 and draft-02 timestamps can interpret them as a draft-00 timestamp and checking the year. If it is too far into the future (> 1000) it is probably a draft-02 timestamp. This allows the same client implementation to query both draft-00 and draft-02 servers.