RFC 5226 (BCP 26) says IANA must be given a set of guidelines that allow it to make allocation decisions with minimal subjectivity and without requiring any technical expertise with respect to the protocols that make use of a registry. and goes on to discuss categories of unassigned code points (though it does also define the unqualified word Unassigned). We were thus advised, when publishing RFC 5444, to specify this clearly and so we had tables such as +---------+-----------------------+------------------------+ | Type | Description | Allocation Policy | +---------+-----------------------+------------------------+ | 0-127 | Unassigned | Expert Review | | 128-223 | Message-Type-specific | Reserved, see Table 11 | | 224-255 | Unassigned | Experimental Use | +---------+-----------------------+------------------------+ (For the purposes of this discussion I suggest ignoring the 128 to 223 line above.) This seemed to keep everyone (IESG, IANA, RFC Editor) happy. -- Christopher Dearlove Technology Leader, Communications Group Communications and Networks Capability BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre West Hanningfield Road, Great Baddow, Chelmsford, CM2 8HN, UK Tel: +44 1245 242194 Fax: +44 1245 242124 BAE Systems (Operations) Limited Registered Office: Warwick House, PO Box 87, Farnborough Aerospace Centre, Farnborough, Hants, GU14 6YU, UK Registered in England & Wales No: 1996687 -----Original Message----- From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Lars Eggert Sent: 14 January 2011 08:23 To: Michelle Cotton Cc: Julian Reschke; stig@xxxxxxxxx; Adrian Farrel; 'The IETF' Subject: Re: Last Call on draft-ietf-pim-registry-03.txt Hi, On 2011-1-13, at 22:43, Michelle Cotton wrote: > Many believe it makes it very clear to the users of the registry what is > available for assignment. Something we will be rolling out soon (for those > registries with a finite space) will be small charts showing how much of the > registry space is unassigned, assigned and reserved (utilizing the > unassigned entries). I mentioned in the past that the term "unassigned" to me at least doesn't make it sufficiently clear that IANA assignment is often needed before codepoints may be taken into use. We have several cases (the many different squats on TCP option numbers, for example) were people pick unassigned codepoints during development and only later realize that they should have registered them. If you want to explicitly list unassigned codepoints in the registries, I'm wondering if we can find a short phrase that makes it more clear that an IANA action is normally required - maybe "available for IANA assignment"? Lars ******************************************************************** This email and any attachments are confidential to the intended recipient and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient please delete it from your system and notify the sender. You should not copy it or use it for any purpose nor disclose or distribute its contents to any other person. ******************************************************************** _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf