[icecast] ICE/1.0 specs

[Samuel Hathaway]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Brendan Cully wrote:

> On Friday, 08 February 2002 at 13:12, Samuel Hathaway wrote:
> > On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Akos Maroy wrote:
> >
> > > Jack Moffitt wrote:
> > >
> > > > Why are you writing clients that don't use libshout?
> > >
> > > darkice doesn't use libshout either.
> > >
> > > I guess the main reason to have a protocol is that anyone can connect
> > > using it?
> >
> > Yeah, what would've happened to the web if NCSA had said "why do you need
> > to know the details of HTTP? just use our library?"
>
> My guess is things would be a lot better - the world would be free of a
> huge amount of cruft supporting broken or obsolete implementations, and
> more effort would have been spent improving an NCSA library.

That may be so, but it also would have locked developers into a specific
implementation -- a particular programming language, a particular
platform, what have you. It also would have forced anyone who couldn't use
the library (for example, someone who couldn't use the license) to reverse
engineer the protocol, probably resulting in *worse* broken
implementations. Closed protocols have a history of problems -- much more
so than open ones.

> I suppose that was a rhetorical question, I'm just not sure which way it
> was supposed to point :)
>
> That aside, it would have been nice if we'd started with HTTP/1.1
> instead of 1.0. So I'd say, give ICE time to develop and use the library
> for now. Once it has been pronounced stable, then you can document and
> reimplement it as much as you want.

For an unstable spec, it's probably good to use the library as a means of
staying up-to-date. However, if it's unstable, why is it "ICE/1.0" rather
than "ICE/0.9" or something?
-samuel

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