[e2e] Are we doing sliding window in the Internet?

[Lloyd Wood]

At Wednesday 03/01/2007 15:51 -0800, Joe Touch wrote:
>Ted Faber wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 02:08:32PM -0800, Joe Touch wrote:
>>> Granted, 'every two' is a SHOULD not a MUST, but that's the only place
>>> for Linux's behavior to be considered compliant. I don't see sufficient
>>> reason in "well, it makes *us* go faster" to warrant overriding SHOULD.
>> 
>> A TCP implementation that acknowledges every packet (and otherwise
>> implements all MUSTs in the relevant RFCs) is a (conditionally)
>> compliant implementation as defined by RFC1122.  I really don't see any
>> ambiguity there. (OK, RFC1122 could say that all conditionally and
>> unconditionally compliant implementations are compliant, which it
>> doesn't, so strictly speaking I should remove the parens around
>> "conditionally" above: "anal-retentive" is hyphenated.)
>
>Conditional compliance should come with a statement of the conditions.
>Absent that, it's just buggy.
>
>Reasonable conditions do not include "it makes *us* go faster"; the
>include things like "this implementation is to be deployed in a limited
>environment that is overwhelmingly satellite-oriented" - e.g., if
>DirectPC were to use a variant for proxy traffic to its home routers
>that overrode SHOULDs for those reasons, that'd be non-buggy.

So, if we're DirecPC, overriding SHOULDs can make us go faster.

Do these semantic wranglings actually have a point?

L.