Re: [babel] RtgDir review: draft-ietf-babel-applicability-06

[Juliusz Chroboczek <[e-mail]>]

Dear Sasha,

Thank you very much for your review, which has helped me improve the document.

> 1.       The text in Section 2.3 says: “in order to check the interoperability
> of two implementations of Babel, it is enough to verify that the interaction of
> the two does not violate the protocol's assumptions.”

This has been fixed.

> 2.       The explanation of the BABEL base assumptions in Section 2.2. is very
> useful. However, it assumes that the reader has at least some intuitive
> understanding of the “routing algebra” notations.

This has been expanded with human-readable comments, and I've added a reference
to my favourite paper on the subject (Griffin and Sobrinho, "Metarouting").

> 3.       The draft mentions 4 independent implementations of BABEL in Section
> 2.1, but does not say anything about their interoperability. Such information,
> if available, should be very useful for the readers. (If no such information is
> available as of this moment, I would accept this)

I have simply added the word "interoperable" to the sentence, which
reflects what the authors of the implementations have reported to me.

> 4.       The comparison between BABEL and IS-IS/OSPF in Section 2.4.1 lacks
> information about possibility of fast local protection mechanisms (a.k.a. IP
> FRR, see, e.g., RFC 5286)

This is an interesting question, and I need to go educate myself on the
subject.  I didn't add anything on this subject.

> 1.       I did not run the nits check on the draft

I have.

> 2.       I think that the work “argue”  in the text in Section 1 “we argue that
> there exist niches where Babel is useful and that are not adequately served by
> more  mature protocols” is by far too weak (or too modest?). From my POV the
> draft goes far beyond arguing.

We now *describe* a few niches that are *arguably* not adequately served.

Thanks again,

-- Juliusz