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Re: SLIP coexisting with serial data?



>> I was thinking of making this another protocol type, akin to what I
>> mentioned (probably on tech-net) back in '02 -
> <baiting-mode>
> Maybe you could get IETF to standardize an extension to *PPP* :-)
> </>

While I hesitate to feed self-admitted trolls :), there actually is a
real point lurking here.

(a)

There's a reason I published my documentation of it as a file in my FTP
space rather than trying to get even an I-D created: the IETF's hoops
are insane.  RFCs used to be people floating ideas.  Then they got
formalized, so I-Ds were created to be the informal version.  But now
even I-Ds have accreted too much formality to be useful.

(b)

I specifically do not want PPP.  Hn '02, when I first designed the
extension to PPP, I sunk an afternoon into trying to use PPP.  My use
case then was a hardwired serial line between two ports dedicated to
the purpose; I was utterly unable to create a configuration that would
come back up seamlessly for every order and timing of reboots.  About
the only thing PPP would have brought to that use case, if I had made
it work, would have been detection of a dead peer, and that was of no
value in that case, since there was nothing to do but drop the packets
if the peer was dead, and that's exactly what SLIP does.

Now, it's possible that I just missed something.  But, while no way am
I a true expert at networking, I'm pretty good; if I can't make it work
in a whole afternoon of trying, at the very least it suffers from being
too complicated.

As soon as I switched to SLIP, on the other hand, it worked first time,
every time.  "Too simple to break".  (The reason I didn't start with
SLIP was that I needed to carry v6 packets.  After an afternoon of
struggling with PPP, an hour or two of hacking on the SLIP
implementation and I had packets flowing.)

(c)

The IETF lives on "rough consensus and running code".  I've got the
running code for v6 and thought some people might be interested either
in that (hence the PR) or in chipping in on how to multiplex serial
data into it.

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