|
Hi, Tom, Keeping in mind that my ask was based on what I, personally, would find helpful to see in documents and not just revealed during extended Last Call discussions as if they were the Dance of the Seven Veils, not intended to express opinions about what the IESG then was doing, and this is slippery-sloping towards a re-litigation of a couple of decades of IETF work ... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Seven_Veils) On 01/30/2014 04:03 AM, t.p. wrote:
Spencer By this criterion, would MPLS ever have entered the Standards Track? Disclaimer: I'm actively chasing history on the "I stands for Internet" topic, so I may be smarter tomorrow, but this is what I'm looking at today. I wasn't there (coincidentally, I was working on TSV stuff during the early days of tag and label switching), and folks on this list were, but I'm given to understand that this was discussed at the time. I've heard the statement "Anything that two consenting routers do over a link layer is their own business" attributed to Tony Li, and that makes more sense if it was half of a discussion, and the other half could be simplified to "is not". RFC 3031 is dated 2001. The IETF mission statement, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3935.txt, was published after that (in 2004, but those ideas didn't spring from nothing in December of 2003), and it says things like > In attempting to resolve the question of the IETF's scope, perhaps > the fairest balance is struck by this formulation: "protocols and > practices for which secure and scalable implementations are expected > to have wide deployment and interoperation on the Internet, or to > form part of the infrastructure of the Internet." I'm assuming the last part of this paragraph is intended to cover things like MPLS, DHCP, and such. Perhaps there are people on this list who would correct me if I misstated this. It is a protocol that works supremely well within the private network of an ISP; extending it to work across the Internet worldwide is more of a challenge and, from what I recall, was not contemplated at the time of RFC3031. Indeed. I offer http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg85344.html for your perusal. It's a thread I'm reading with some interest :p Spencer Spencer |