Re: [babel] Mirja Kühlewind's Discuss on draft-ietf-babel-rfc6126bis-12: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Mirja Kuehlewind <[e-mail]>]

Hi Juliusz,

I did reply to this message a while ago.

I think this is a fine approach for algorithms (as you say below) however it is not useful for recommended parameters of an algorithm that is the define in the body of of the spec.

Also note that my point is not about interoperability but about safety. Often these kind of requirements are not enforceable by the protocol itself, so an implementator could diverge from the recommendation without breaking the protocol, however, it is still important to give the right recommendation in the spec. We all know that just writing a MUST or SHOULD in an RFC that will not automatically mean that is always done that way, however, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to write it down.

Mirja



> On 7. Jan 2020, at 12:49, Juliusz Chroboczek <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Dear Mirja,
> 
> You made the very same proposition on 22 August 2019 (almost half a year ago!).
> Here is what I replied at the time:
> 
>    I am sorry, but I disagree.  The original document that I submitted for
>    IETF review back in 2009 had the structure that you suggest, but the
>    reviewer (Joel Halpern) convinced me to a adopt the following structure:
> 
>      - the body of the document describes the main algorithm, the parts that
>        are required to enforce the strong guarantees that the protocol makes
>        about lack of loops and forward progress;
>      - the appendices describe algorithms that have been shown to be useful
>        over some link layers but that might need to be tweaked when Babel is
>        run over new, exciting link layers.
> 
>    Since Joel did a good job convincing me, it will take some work to
>    convince me otherwise.
> 
> -- Juliusz
>