Hi.
I just had occasion to look again at RFC 2428, "FTP Extensions
for IPv6 and NATs", M. Allman, S. Ostermann, C. Metz. September
1998, and to think about in the context of the recent
flame-war^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discussions about use of IP
addresses in applications. 2428 provides additional syntax and
mechanisms for FTP to deal with IPv6, with some useful
properties for NATs (useful if you believe in NATs). It appears
to provide only for addresses and does not appear to be
extensible except to the addressing formats of new versions of
IP.
It seems appropriate to ask whether 2428 should be opened and
given at least the capability of passing DNS names and maybe
some syntax that would permit clean extension to future
identifiers. In the unlikely event that there is insufficient
interest or energy to do that work, should it be moved to
historic or otherwise given a "not recommended" status as
potentially harmful and inconsistent with the principle that
applications (especially for IPv6) should be passing names and
not IP addresses?
Please consider this a fairly narrow question. I don't want to
start either the "applications level identifiers" debate or the
NAT wars again and they aren't necessary to answering the
question. On those topics, please, everyone, your points --pro,
con, or otherwise-- have been made and anyone who is going to be
convinced has been convinced. More traffic on those subjects in
the guise of responding to this question will just convince more
people that it is impossible to carry out a technical discussion
on the IETF list.
john