Re: Support for 240/4 and 0/8 addresses in NetBSD

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Seth David Schoen <schoen%loyalty.org@localhost> writes:

> (1) The drafts I linked to are indeed our own proposals and are not
> Internet standards.  They're technically not individual submissions,
> because that has a technical meaning in the IETF process, but we may end
> up publishing versions of these drafts through the individual submissions
> process in the future, in which case they would still not be official
> Internet standards and would have a different disclaimer on top about
> not being standards-track documents.
>
> I didn't mean for anyone to think that our proposals were Internet
> standards, although we have been pursuing them at the IETF.  I shared
> these drafts because they include a lot of background information and
> argument, including exactly what changes we think should be made, why
> we think these changes would be useful, how the status quo developed,
> and how different operating systems (and other network software tools)
> do or don't follow the behaviors we suggest.  If anyone is interested
> in any of these topics, you should be able to find some answers in our
> Internet-Drafts.

I'm having a hard time following.  You said they aren't individual - but
in the filename your name is the first token, which is what I thought
was the convention for individual.  And the tracker says:

  Type 		Active Internet-Draft (individual) 

which sure looks like an individual submission, at least to me.

They clearly aren't working group documents, and they don't seem headed
for Draft Standard according to the labels in the tracker.  The
introduction of the first document doesn't explain stream/track.  Can
you explain then what the status of the documents is and where they are
headed?  (I used to be very clear on IETF process but haven't been
paying close attention lately.)

I would have expected them to be standards-track and come from a WG or
perhaps the Internet Area (which seems like a pseudo WG with the same
kind of stature).  Then it would have been draft-intarea-foo, though.
And I think you are saying it isn't that.

> We've been encouraging OS developers to consider making these changes in
> advance of IETF standardization, which we don't think has been an unusual
> position in Internet history.  It seems not uncommon that developers
> adopted behaviors that they were persuaded were useful or potentially
> useful, even while standards discussions were just beginning or were
> still unsettled; developers have also often implemented behaviors from
> drafts for many different reasons.  The old IETF slogan "rough consensus
> and running code" and the practice of submitting work for standardization
> after one already has interoperable implementations seem to reflect that.

Sure, but that's generally implementing a proposal that does something
new that is not contrary to existing standards.   And it's often when
there is a WG draft that is headed for standardization.

> But again, if people disagree or aren't comfortable with that, sysctls
> and opt-in are a time-honored approach.

I think that is what we are landing on; there have been several comments
(including me) that we shouldn't change given the lack of
standardization, and I haven't seen any in favor of just changing.   So
I think the next step is someone who cares enough to spend time (not
trying to be unkind; that's just how it is) to create a patch that adds
sysctls and changes behavior based on them.  As you say that lets any
admin change the behavior, and if this is later draft standard we can
change the default and later gc the sysctl.