People need to understand that the purpose of the Pseudowire stuff (PWE3) is
to enable service providers to offer existing services over IP networks, so
that they can convert their backbones to IP without first requiring that all
their customers change their access equipment. Producing the protocols
needed to enable migration from legacy networks to IP networks seems to me
to be quite in the mainstream of IETF. The technical issues, involving
creating tunnels, multiplexing sessions through tunnels, performing service
emulation at the session endpoints, are all issues that the IETF has taken
up in the past, there is nothing radically different going on here.
(To those who think that other standards organizations can do this better,
well, representatives from those other organizations feel free to drop in on
the WGs in question, so we are familiar with their level of expertise on
IP. Let's just say that if we want to aid in the migration of legacy
networks to IP, these other organizations are not what we would want to rely
on.)
One can think of the VPWS work in L2VPN as taking the PWE3 stuff and adding
some IP-based auto-discovery mechanisms to facilitate provisioning. Again,
this isn't out of line with what the IETF typically does.
The VPLS work is more difficult to position within the IETF, as it is hard
to avoid a lot of stuff that overlaps with IEEE (a standards org which
really is worthy of respect, unlike some others), and extending ethernet
over an IP network is arguably a bad idea. On the other hand, the purpose
is the same as indicated above; service providers can migrate from their
Q-in-Q ethernet networks to IP networks, without first requiring their
customers to switch from an ethernet service to an IP service.