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by doug_durham 201 days ago
Having been in the business of creating standards compliant equipment in the past, the problem is not as simple as you state. You can provide all of the reference implementations you want and you still will get variances.

The state-of-the-art solution is to put a bunch of people on planes and burn a bunch of jet fuel to attend a "test fest". You can't issue interoperability until you do this. This costs money that needs to be paid by someone.
1 comments
ur-whale 201 days ago
> ou can provide all of the reference implementations you want and you still will get variances.

A proper reference implementation should first and foremost come with an extensive battery of regression tests, something many a vaunted "standard" utterly fails to provide, being instead tomes upon tomes of impossible to decipher specifications, written - of all things - in human language.

Such a battery of regression tests, if properly design ought to take care of your "variations" in fairly short order.

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doug_durham 200 days ago
In practice they never do. There are too many corner cases that people don't think of. It's almost a law of nature that you can't capture the complexity of any non-trivial specification in regression tests.
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