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Re: [p2pi] WG Review: Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (alto)

2008-10-10 11:11:39
Hi Enrico, Vijay,

Thank you for the summary of what transpired after the Dublin meeting. I appreciate you taking the time.

My reading at the BoF was that there were some concerns about this work being done in haste without clearly understanding what it is that we want to do and what it is that we need to do to address this particular problem space (there were even suggestions to move some of the work to the IRTF). My perception and my understanding of some of the dissenting opinions was that some of those need to be worked out before creating a working group. We have been in situations where working groups have been created in haste to address important and urgent problems, but then people disagree so much in working groups that some such working groups never made any real progress or had to be shut down (folks, please don't try to guess which WG(s) and try to explain the individual situations; thanks). Surely, we don't want that to happen here.

Some of the disagreements here in this thread now, and the intent of some of the folks to whitewash the issues raised do seem troublesome.

It would be great if we could rather focus on trying to understand all aspects of the problem, have the charter reflect the correct level of scope (too wide or too narrow are problematic as we know), and move forward.

thanks,
Lakshminath

On 10/10/2008 5:15 AM, Enrico Marocco wrote:
Lakshminath Dondeti wrote:
The minutes (http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08jul/minutes/alto.txt) say
this:

+++++++++++++++
Many people agreed that this is important work for the IETF, also some
(less) people hummed against.  Hum was inconclusive - some of the "no"
hums were (in Jon's words) vehement.
+++++++++++++++

Given that there was no consensus, it would have been nice if the
sponsoring AD(s) or the IESG explained what's going on, but then
transparency, it appears, is not really a goal in this case.  If the
idea was to just go forward anyway, we really wasted 3, may be 6 months.
  The half measures are a waste of everyone's time.

Lakshminath, the objections raised during the BoF in Dublin were on very
specific issues, namely the "general service discovery problem"
supposedly addressed by the charter, a too broad scope in terms of
information exchanged between ALTO clients and ALTO servers, and the
connection between traffic localization and optimization someone seemed
to see implied in the problem statement. During the weeks following the
meeting, people who had expressed concerns at the mic and on the list
constructively contributed to the discussion and the group converged on
a charter the current version is a slight variant of. For this reason,
and for the amount of interest shown in Dublin  -- we called
inconclusive the hum on the charter, but interest in the problem was
made pretty clear by what we heard at the mic, by the number of
contributors, and by the number of people in the room -- we managed to
convince our sponsoring AD (and transitively the IESG) to send it out
for IETF-wide review. If the community identifies new serious issues or
considers the old ones not completely addressed, probably a new BoF will
be the best way to sort them out.

Of course I'm only speaking for myself, not certainly on behalf of Lisa
nor the IESG.

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