Going forward with NTS

[Hal Murray]

esr at thyrsus.com said:
> Don't you think it makes sense to very our client code against a known-good
> implementation first, though?

Maybe.  Maybe not.

If we had a known-good server and somebody who was sitting next to me knew all 
about it and was prepared to help debug, sure that would be a good way to go.

But I don't agree with your "first".  I think we know enough about what we 
need to do that the risk of wasting a lot of effort because we got a bogus 
program structure is low so I don't see the need to do that testing early.

Devil's advocate hat on.  We should debug as much as possible independently 
and then see if they inter-operate.  If not, we should figure out why.  If the 
people reading the specs got different answers, there is probably a section 
that needs tweaking to avoid an ambiguity.

Here is an alternative sequence...
  Write hack program to call NTS-KE-server, send request, get answer, decode 
and print answer.
  Debug that program on existing remote server.
  Use it to debug our server.
  ...

That program would probably be handy for debugging so maybe we should write it 
anyway.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.