The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Deprecation of BGP Path Attribute values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242, and 243' (draft-ietf-idr-deprecate-30-31-129-02.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the Inter-Domain Routing Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Alvaro Retana, Alia Atlas and Deborah Brungard. A URL of this Internet Draft is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-idr-deprecate-30-31-129/ Technical Summary This document requests IANA to mark BGP path attribute values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242, and 243 as "deprecated". These values were found to be in use in the Internet, despite not having been allocated by IANA. Working Group Summary This document arises because as part of the development of the large communities specification, values 30 and 31 were discovered to be "squatted" on by fielded implementations. Subsequently, two other implementations were found to be "squatting" on the other values. There was some debate in the working group as to whether it was better to deprecate the code points or to somehow "punish" the offending implementers. One of the arguments in favor of deprecation was that pragmatically speaking, no implementer would reasonably want to use one of the tainted code points and if forced to do so, no operator would be excited to deploy the resulting feature. The deprecation process was identified as the appropriate one to allow IANA to flag them as unfit for use. There was good working group consensus for this position. Document Quality This is a trivial process document. It has received good WG attention including review by people associated with all parties "squatting" on the affected path attribute values. Personnel Document Shepherd: John Scudder Responsible Area Director: Alvaro Retana
