LDUP BOF draft minutes

["John C. Strassner" <johns@xxxxxxxxx>]

LDUPers,

here are the proposed minutes from the Chicago LDUP BOF. Please
review and comment to the list if there are any additions,
deletions, or changes.

----------------------- snip ------------------------------------

The LDUP BOF was attended by approximately 100 people.
After reviewing the BOF agenda, the co-chairs polled the room
to determine who had reviewed the proposed LDUP WG charter.
No one other than the LDUP Engineering Team members had read
the proposed charter. Due to printing problems, neither
co-chair actually had charts that would support detailed review
of the charter in the meeting. There was a suggestion to shift
detailed discussion of the charter to the end of the meeting
while such charts were created.

With this agenda change, Chris Apple reported on the 
LDUP Engineering Team's progress since the last BOF:

	+ The LDAP replication requirements draft has been
	  revised twice.

	+ We met face-to-face in May-1998 for a round-robin
	  set of implementor LDAP replication presentations.

	+ We held a follow-up conference call to resolve
	  diverging uses of the same terminology, identify and
	  resolve any remaining issues in the requirements document,
	  and make a decision on whether or not to proceed with
	  multiple LDAP replication proposals. We all agreed that
	  creating one set of LDAP replication specifications
	  is better than proceeding with multiple competing sets.

The LDUP Engineering Team is now moving forward with a single
Replication Architecture, which will produce (at least) seven major
RFCs. The next section of the meeting consisted of three
presentations that were overviews of three of these seven documents:

	1) Russ Weiser gave a brief overview of the LDAP
	   replication requirements document.

	2) John Merrells gave a thorough and well received
	   presentation on the pre-I-D version of an LDAP
	   Replication Architecture document. This document will
	   serve as a foundation for other documents currently
	   being drafted by various members of the LDUP Engineering
	   Team. There were three significant issues identified during
	   this presentation (all of which will require careful
	   attention over the coming months):

		i) more work is required to define initiator versus
		   consumer ownership of replicated entries and
		   entry attributes

		ii) sparse and fractional replication is very complicated
		    and must be appropriately constrained so that a
		    tractable solution is possible (the BOF-room concensus
		    was that specifying a read-only constraint for the
		    non-original replicas is a good start; more discussion
		    will occur on the list)

		iii) time can be our worst enemy when it comes to
		     conflict detection and resolution (there was
		     some discussion about how this is related to
		     how you handle the issue of sequence numbers for
		     LDAP transactions that are to be applied against
		     replicas; more discussion is to occur on the list
		     about sequence numbers and time)

	3) Ed Reed gave a brief overview of the LDAP Information
	   Model document. The document is currently under engineering
	   team review. It will contain specifications of schema elements
	   required to implement replication agreements and replication
	   processes. During this presentation there was more discussion
	   about the pros and cons of time-based and monotonic sequence
	   numbers for transactions in a distributed replication
	   environment. We agreed that this subject would be punted
	   to the list.
	    
We reviewed John Strassner's hand-written charts of content from
the proposed WG charter and John read aloud the sections of
the charter that he didn't have time to scribe. There were a few
comments and requests for changes:

	- the terms "updateable", "writeable" and similar terms are
	  used interchangeably; we agreed to use only the term
	  "updateable"

	- add a sentence indicating motivation for solving the
	  single- and multi-master replication problems

	- replace terms like "zombies", "graveyard", and
	  "tombstones" with "deletion state" or a grammatically
	  appropriate substitute

	- add "v3" to all uses of "LDAP" in this charter

	- use a consistent prefix for all document titles:

		"LDAPv3 Replication..."

	- several milestone dates were changed to make them
	  more realistic. It should be noted that all of the
         authors of these documents that were present stated
         that they should be able to hold these new dates.

The co-chairs have an action to post a revised proposed charter
to the mailing list for a review period of one week and will
follow this up with a request for IESG review.

Three out of the 7 documents that group will produce have been
drafted and are to be published as I-Ds (or revised if already
published) over the next few weeks.

When polled, BOF attendees expressed strong interest in forming
a working group based on the charter discussions and the architecture
presentation. The BOF-room concensus was that forming a WG is
in order. No dissenting opinion was expressed. Finally, Patrik
stated that he has been monitoring the progress of the Engineering
Team and is pleased, and also thinks that forming a WG is a
Good Thing.

regards,
Chris and John