William X Walsh wrote: > In the interest of contributing to the effort, perhaps, now that you > have gone through it and know where the docs could be improved as a > result, you could provide more details and suggestions to Scott and > the team as to specifically what should be changed or added? > > Part of being here is being a member of the opensrs "community" and > contributing to each other as much as possible, perhaps this can be > your contribution?
I understand Robert's frustration. Protocol docs are something best created and distributed by OpenSRS. They design the protocol and create software to use it, so they should have internal protocol docs. These docs should be published. It would save RPSs a multitude of headaces. It's a shame to not have a DTD on an XML protocol publicly available. Saying "the implementation is the specification" is silly and bad programming practice. It's a waste for the community to reverse engineer the protocol so that other implementations can be created. This smacks of what happens with closed source software: the protocol has to be reversed engineered. I'm all for Robert contributing and publishing his protocol docs. But this does not remove the fact that OpenSRS really should be doing this. I know a company that was developing a generic domain name portal and skipped supporting OpenSRS because they said that the protocol was too complicated. We all know the protocol is simple, it's just that it's not documented. Any black box seems complicated. Almost two years and counting (I think) without Protocol docs: just shameful. David -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of William X Walsh Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 12:36 PM To: Robert Dale Cc: OpenSRS dev-list Subject: Re[2]: opensrs (was Re: FW: DES IV) Robert, In the interest of contributing to the effort, perhaps, now that you have gone through it and know where the docs could be improved as a result, you could provide more details and suggestions to Scott and the team as to specifically what should be changed or added? Part of being here is being a member of the opensrs "community" and contributing to each other as much as possible, perhaps this can be your contribution? Wednesday, Wednesday, February 13, 2002, 7:31:43 AM, Robert Dale wrote: > On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Scott Allan wrote: >> - I would note that many people have been able to get things working on >> different platforms > This seems to be a popular response to my quibble. Multiple people have > pointed out to me that it's work with different languages/platforms. > I know, I am one of those people! The point is that there is a significant > barrier to those wishing to write a client using a different language who > do not already know perl because the protocol docs are so poor. I don't > think it's an appropriate solution to say go look at the PHP client, or this > and that client (what if I don't know those languages?). However, that's the > only answer today. I took the time to learn an adequate amount of perl so I > could understand OpenSRS's implementation. And after dealing with perl's black > magic, I much rather would have had plain ol' protocol docs. The protocol is > actually quite simple, but is made out to be a bear. >> - if you are not getting responses to your questions, we can correct this - >> just drop us a note off-list with your ticket numbers and we can follow >> through - protocol questions can be trickier as they are not as common, so >> our response time is likely slower - posting protocol questions to this >> list can be a quick way to get the info you seek, as many here have worked >> it out already, or are "in the know" > The only outstanding question I have now is whether or not OpenSRS is going > to provide a current DTD for the protocol. I'm not quite sure when it was > available or when it disappeared, but it certainly hasn't been included in any > of the 2.4x releases. I have no problem keeping my own DTD up to date. But > the issue becomes more difficult should there ever be a significant change and > is not properly documented. I will be more than happy to follow this up > off-list if it can't be answered here. -- Best regards, William X Walsh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- OpenSRS installation and customizations Payment Processing Integration Apache Installation and Support Services http://www.wxsoft.com/
