Re: [bess] Éric Vyncke's Abstain on draft-ietf-bess-mvpn-fast-failover-13: (with COMMENT)

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Hi Eric,

Speaking as BESS WG chair, you raised a very valid point on the publication of documents that have no implementation (or plan of implementation). This is also a concern that I have in general, as we cannot really prove that a technology/specification is working properly if it hasn't been implemented.
I think the discussion is a bit orthogonal to this particular document.
In the routing area, each WG is free to have its own policy regarding implementations. In BESS, the WG decided that there will be an implementation poll then if there is no implementation, and if WG is still fine progressing the doc without an implementation, the document will continue until publication. Good or bad that could be discussed but this is the WG consensus (it was there before I took over the chair seat). This policy differs across WGs.
I don't think that the date of the doc really matters, even if the doc was more recent, nothing says that there will be an implementation in future, so situation will be the same. I personally don't like having non implemented specs but it's not just up to me and again this goes beyond just this document.

Brgds,

Stephane

-----Original Message-----
From: Éric Vyncke via Datatracker <[e-mail]> 
Sent: mercredi 16 décembre 2020 11:06
To: The IESG <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]; Stephane Litkowski <[e-mail]>; [e-mail]
Subject: Éric Vyncke's Abstain on draft-ietf-bess-mvpn-fast-failover-13: (with COMMENT)

Éric Vyncke has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-bess-mvpn-fast-failover-13: Abstain

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COMMENT:
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Thank you for the work put into this document.

I have balloted ABSTAIN in the sense of "I oppose this document but understand that others differ and am not going to stand in the way of the others." because of the use outside of a node of the IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses in section 3.1.6.1. A reply on this topic will be welcome.

Stéphane in his doc shepherd's write up states that no implementation is known for a document born in 2008... Does the IETF really want to have this on the proposed standards track ?

Please find below my ABSTAIN point, some non-blocking COMMENT points (but replies would be appreciated), and one nits.

I hope that this helps to improve the document,

Regards,

-éric

== ABSTAIN ==
-- Section 3.1.6.1 --
I appreciate that the BFD WG relies on "::ffff:127.0.0.0/104" but those IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses are assumed to never leave a node and should never be transmitted over the Internet (see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5156#section-2.2). This is the cause of my ABSTAIN. As the inner packet is sent over a tunnel, why not using the a link-local address or the ff02::1 link-local multicast group ?

== COMMENTS ==

-- Section 2.3 --
The use of "upstream" and "Upstream" could be confusing... The latter could have been "Upstream PE/ABSR" (often used later in the document) or "ingress node"

-- Section 3.1.6 --
Could the "BFD Discreminator" attribute be used for other purpose than this document? If so, then why not specifying it in *another* document?

Should this document clearly state that it does not define any TLV ?

== NITS ==

As I am probably not the only reader have difficulties to remember RFC contents by their number, may I suggest to prefix the RFC numbers with their titles ?
Esp in the introduction ;-)