Re: text suggested by ADs

> > > And, FWIW, when the AD suggests specific text changes, it's often 
> > > enough the desire of that AD rather than based on feedback from some 
> > > other WG.
> > I don't see anything wrong with that.  It's the ADs' job to push back 
> > on documents with technical flaws.  They're supposed to use their 
> > judgments as technical experts, not just be conduits of information 
> > supplied by others.
> That's fine when that is what they do. What you're hearing here is 
> that it is not uniformly so.
Yes, I understand that, and many of us can cite specific cases where 
the power was inappropriately used.  But from a _process_ 
point-of-view, I don't see how to avoid the potential for misuse and 
still get the review that seems essential to keeping the quality level 
up.  We try to arrange that there are alternatives to having good 
proposals killed or stalled by capricious ADs - like appeals, the 
process that IESG now has to bypass a single member's DISCUSS, the 
independent submission process via the RFC Editor, etc.  And maybe we 
need more alternatives.  But I don't see how to get rid of the review.
> The issue here is that ADs are human, with all the flaws the rest of 
> us have. Yes, they try pretty hard to make the documents that come out 
> of working groups "right", and they have to work pretty hard to make 
> that happen. They also have their hobby-horses, and make comments 
> during IESG review that should have been made "AD hat off" on the 
> mailing list.
yes, yes, and yes.

Keith

p.s. FWIW & IMnsHO, ULAs, while useful, are at best only a small part 
of a satisfactory solution for keeping addresses stable across 
renumbering, even for applications that entirely run on local networks. 
 Even to explain why this is the case is not simple, but briefly: a) 
There are multiple reasons for a site to use ULAs (some more defensible 
than others) and it's not reasonable for an application to assume that 
a ULA is more appropriate for any particular purpose than any other 
prefix.  Different applications will have different requirements for 
addressing (some need stable addresses, others need privacy, others 
need maximum efficiency/throughput or minimum delay, others need 
addresses that are reachable by all participating hosts) and these 
requirements can even change depending on the set of hosts 
participating in an application. A default set of address selection 
rules (as we are already seeing) will not work well.  It appears 
possible to design a protocol that allows the network to tell hosts 
when ULA prefixes are equivalent to, but more stable than, other 
prefixes advertised on the network (and I wrote an I-D describing such 
a protocol), and it's possible to design an API extension which allows 
apps to say "please use stable addresses on this connection when 
available".  This would allow ULA-aware apps to make use of ULAs when 
they are available and when the network operator believes ULAs are more 
stable than PA or other prefixes.  But that requires a lot more than 
just the existence of ULAs to be workable, and even then, they only 
solve the stability problem for what is arguably a corner case.

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