Going forward with NTS

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> 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.

This sounds like you volunteering to write and test the code.

If that's so, I won't argue with what sequence you choose to do it in.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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