At 12:55 PM 10/10/2003, Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:
All in all, however, I think outright removal, although short-term more
painful, will be less troublesome than many years of debugging problems
caused by 1918-style leakage of addresses for a "deprecated" feature.
That may be so. It is a third discussion, and is appropriate to the IPv6 list.
The first discussion is Tony's appeal, which is a procedural discussion and
should not be debated on the basis of whether one agrees or disagrees with
the particular feature (site-local addresses) but on the basis of whether
the right consensus development and recognition procedures were followed.
The Author/Editor of the procedural description has commented that it
looked problematic to him.
The second is the side point I raised with Margaret: in the general case of
"things in specifications", removing something from a specification does
not mean that someone can still use it. Deprecation protects such a usage,
but removal does not.
The third point, the one you address, is where all this started out, which
is whether or not one should entertain site-local addresses at all. It is
relevant to neither the procedural discussion nor the general discussion
about removing features. But it is clearly something that the IPv6 working
group needs to have a consensus opinion on. That is actually not the
subject of either appeal, and should not enter into the discussion of
either appeal, as it has no bearing on the thing appealed - which is the
procedural issue. Using the wrong procedure to accomplish the right result
(if one assumes that this is what happened) is just as bad as using the
right procedure to produce the wrong result. One wants to use the right
procedure *and* produce the right result.
When I changed the topic, I changed the subject line... Let's not confuse
issues.