Subject: IPP> ADM - Minutes from PWG IPP Phone Conference on June 11, 1997

From: Carl-Uno Manros <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 17:16:51 PDT

Minutes from PWG IPP Phone Conference on June 11, 1997

Attending: Carl-Uno Manros, chair and minute taker
           Tom Hastings
           Peter Zehler
           Paul Moore
           Babak Jahromi
           Roger deBry
           Bob Herriot
           Randy Turner
	    Jeff Copeland
           Jay Martin

(Don Wright and Steve Zilles are currently in Japan and couldn't make it,
and Scott Isaacson had a last minute conflict and couldn't make it).

Main discussion point was how to fit in the latest proposal from Paul Moore
with the rest of the IPP documentation, in particular with the Model and
Protocol documents.

It was agreed that we should only have one Protocol mapping document.

It was further agreed that we should only have a minimum set of Operations
that need to be supported, with the remaining ones being optional for the
time being.
This will mean some rewording in the Model document.  We will not talk
about conformance levels, but indicate in the text that we plan to
introduce such during the progression of our documents from Proposed to
Draft standards. The only two operations that would be mandatory for all
implementations initially are the Validate and Print-Job operations, and
implementations will direct how many of the remaining operations will be
"promoted" to mandatory later on.  The Validate operation will need to
return an attribute which lists the operations that a are supported by the
Printer. The main usage of the Validate operation will otherwise be to
establish whether authentication will be required for subsequent operations.
The description of many Mandatory attributes in the Model document will
need to reflect that they are now Conditionally Mandatory dependent on
whether the operation is supported or not. The set of truly Mandatory
attributes is expected to be very small (for further discussion).

It was also discussed what to do with print-by-reference. It was suggested
that we create two new "shadow-operations" for print-by-reference, one that
looks like the Print-Job operation called Print-URI, which is like
Print-Job, but has an attribute containing a URI instead of the print-data.
Similarly one that looks like the Send-Document but called Send-URI. It
will then be crystal clear whether an implementation supports
print-by-reference, by examining whether one or both of these operations
are supported. This proposal does not suggest adding additional attributes
for security.

Some general discussion was held about a few inconsistencies between the
latest proposal from Paul Moore and the current Model and emerging Protocol
documents.
In particular, the proposed mixing if binary and text encoding was
controversial.
It was felt that we should continue working on a solution based on ABNF,
which assumes text-based encoding.  There was still some discussion about
whether we need lengths for values or use some special character to mark
the end of a value.
Further discussion of this on the DL and we hope to resolve this in the
June 17 PWG Protocol meeting.

Some further discussion about the Operations as described the Model
document is that they need further work, to make clear what comes back when
an operation has succeeded vs. when it failed.  We also need to get more
error descriptions included.  Randy has already given proposals to Scott
for how to fix much of this.

Randy expects to have a new internal draft of the Protocol mapping in time
to review at the June 17 meeting and we will hopefully be ready to issue a
I-D shortly afterwards.

Roger announced that we can expect to see a new Directory Schema I-D
shortly, and probably also soon a Security draft that can go out as an I-D.

Carl-Uno suggested that everybody now read the Model I-D and give feedback
to the editor and to the DL for anything that needs further discussion.
Carl-Uno has sent a message to Patrick about his role in producing the
IPP/RFC 1179 mapping, but is still waiting for a reply.  It was felt that
the mapping could be done from the Model document and that there was no
need to wait for the Protocool document in order to get started.

The agenda for the June 17 meeting will be to review Randy's new Protocol
mapping draft, which by then should have integrated suitable parts from
Paul Moore's draft.

Carl-Uno indicated that he would like to spend some time on all our
documents during the June 25-26 meeting of the PWG IPP group in Nassau, NH.
This would also include the Requirements and IPP/RFC 1179 Mappings.
However, the majority of the time will probably be spent on making sure
that the Model and Protocol document are now synchronized and complete.

We will have our next PWG IPP phone conference as usual on Wednesdayt next
week, even though many of us will meet on Tuesday in the Protocol meeting.

------

Carl-Uno

Carl-Uno Manros
Principal Engineer - Advanced Printing Standards - Xerox Corporation
701 S. Aviation Blvd., El Segundo, CA, M/S: ESAE-231
Phone +1-310-333 8273, Fax +1-310-333 5514
Email: [email-masked]