On Nov 13, 2013, at 5:05 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
On Nov 13, 2013, at 10:49 AM, Ole Troan <otroan(_at_)employees(_dot_)org>
wrote:
is there a problem here, or should we just accept that sometimes the IETF
will generate ten sets of publications solving more or less the same problem?
If I'd been area director earlier in the process
You rang?
I might have just shut the working group when it became clear that the
principals couldn't agree on a proposal, and required that they come to
agreement before a BoF would be approved.
Not chartering work doesn't always help as it can scatter people to the winds
to create their own parallel efforts. The 13+ IPv4 over IPv6 solutions you see
were born from the rubble of trying to keep DS-Lite as the only chartered work
softwires would look at for IPv4 over IPv6 with some kind of built-in IPv4
address sharing.
Ted, when we started softwires, I noted very clearly that I would reject every
transition protocol to come my way until the WG agreed on a finite set of
problem-spaces and associated solutions. Note I didn't say reject _chartering_
the work or having a BoF, I said reject the proposals that did not come via the
WG (e.g., as an end-run to the chartered effort). This gave people a common
place to work, and at the start that's exactly what it did. We held 3 interim
meetings, and killed many more proposals than we advanced. By the time my AD
tenure was up, we had identified L2TP for point-to-point stateful tunnels from
hosts and such (largely because it was already in so many places already). We
had a second solution for larger core networks (essentially a generalization of
MPLS' 6PE). The third was 6rd, building on 6to4 in a manner that was far more
palatable to an operator to deploy and had the obvious scaling properties over
L2TP. So, the happy medium for what were deployed a!
s largely IPv6 over IPv4 solutions ended up somewhere between
"one-size-fits-all" and "everything-goes".
To my memory the 4/6 mess kicked a bit later. The mess started not because the
WG allowed too much in its charter, but because it was rejecting so much work
outright that it didn't give people a trusted place to come together and work
towards a compromise sooner rather than later.
My point is that sometimes we fail when we don't give people the right
environment to work together and make compromises early on in the hopes of
rising the tide for everyone. If groups remain in their respective corners
working on their own for too long, they are bound to create their own parallel
paths. The longer that is allowed to happen, the more entrenched the solutions
become, until the IETF has lost its ability to do anything constructive beyond
publishing everything.
- Mark
But it's much too late in the process to do that now. And I don't even
know if that would have produced a better outcome.
I don't think we should accept that this has to happen every time, and I
think we should try to prevent it happening in the future. But there is no
sense crying over spilt milk.
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