Re: [babel] draft-ietf-babel-applicability WG Last Call

["Adrian Farrel" <[e-mail]>]

> > Suggest to strike the following.
> 
> >    Given a sufficiently friendly audience, the principles
> >    behind Babel can be explained in 15 minutes, and a full description
> >    of the protocol can be done in 52 minutes (one microcentury).
> 
> Strongly disagree.  Comprehensibility and implementability are important
> properties of Babel (second only to the fact that it works).  I'm open to
> rewording if you find the current wording overly whimsical.

How about...

Babel is easily comprehensible and implementable. The principles behind Babel
can be quickly explained, and a full description of the protocol takes just 48
pages in [RFC6126bis].

> > I'm personally a little sceptical about the first example [in Section
> > 2.2] because my experience suggests that coders are fiendishly capable
> > of constructing bugs that do all manner of unexpected things.
> 
> This is based on actual experience.  I'll try to reword it, but I stand by
> my claim.
> 
> For example, an early version of babeld had a bug that randomly corrupted
> buffers; with high probability, the corruption happened within an IPv6
> address, so nodes would simply learn spurious host routes that would time
> out after a few seconds.  (It took us ages to find the bug, in the
> meantime we were running with a network populated with occasional
> "martians".)
> 
> Another example: I've recently introduced a bug in the sending of
> triggered updates (fixed in 1.8.1).  The effect was that convergence was
> slowed down in some cases, until the next periodic update, but the
> loop-avoidance mechanisms were still functional, so not much harm happened.
> 
> I'll think about how to reword it, perhaps summarising the two examples
> above might be useful.

OK. Maybe saying that "The protocol is robust against bugs such as buffer
corruption, message loss, and timer disruption" would cover it?

Cheers,
Adrian