g'day,
Dave Crocker wrote:
. . .
It strikes me that it would be much, much more productive to fire up a
working group focused on this topic, since we have known of the application
level need for about 12 years, if not longer.
Which raises the interesting question as to what the participants would hope to
be the outcome of such a working group and whether we could possibly move
towards something ressembling a technical consensus, given the current polarity
of the debate. There are certainly more people than Keith who would brand the
relevant practices as evil and immoral. For sure you'd hear strong views
against endorsing transparent proxies, NATs and other things already touched
upon here over the past few months. I could mention a few more, at least as
controversial, which I'd see as coming into scope in the near future but
frankly I'm not personally willing to spend any energy trying to engage in any
form of consensus building on such things right now. The parties are simply too
far apart for me to expect there to be anything but grief at the other end.
I've seen us spend a lot of time engaging in working groups in which some
number of the participants has as their goal the invalidating of the underlying
concept or torpedoing the process itself. Having been there, done that and
collected the T-shirt a couple of times myself, I wouldn't go through that
again just because I have a soft spot, either for the IETF or in my head.
That isn't to say I disagree with you, Dave. There's definitely work to be done
here. It's just that this is one hairy tarball, and although there's going to
be lots done in this area over the next couple of years we've probably reached
a fork in the road where the IETF has to take stock of itself before it can
play a useful role. If it doesn't do that I predict that some of the major
architectural and implementation decisions in this particular subspace will be
taking place outside the IETF. And clearly, some would think that a good thing.
- peterd
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Peter Deutsch work email:
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Technical Leader
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Cisco Systems or :
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Alcohol and calculus don't mix. Never drink and derive.
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