[Bier] Shepherd's review of draft-ietf-bier-bar-ipa

[Greg Mirsky <[e-mail]>]

Dear WG Chairs,
we're waiting for one author to respond to the IPR poll on the draft.

Dear Authors,
thank you for the well-written document. The proposed solution is elegant
and presented clearly. I have several comments and questions. Also a number
of nits that may be worth your attention. First, comments and questions:

   - In Section 2 the requirement to provision BAR and IPA values uses
   SHOULD:

   For a particular sub-domain, all routers SHOULD be provisioned with
   and signal the same BAR and IPA values.

Do you think that the MUST is more suitable and would not require a change
of the text that follows?


   - Could the following benefit from the use of the normative language?

   It is expected that both the BAR and IPA values could have both
   algorithm and constraints semantics.
>From the text that follows, it seems that both semantics are required for a
router to calculate the underlay path. Is that correct? Also, is there a
default value of a semantic? If that is the case, it would be helpful to
state that explicitly.


   - There is a pair of requirements in Section 2:

   When a new BAR value is defined, its corresponding BC/BA semantics
   MUST be specified.  For a new IGP Algorithm to be used as a BIER IPA,
   its RC/RA semantics MUST also be clear.
The last sentence can benefit from mode details of what is required to make
RC/RA semantics clear. Would s/clear/clearly specified/ be acceptable?

Nits:

   - AFAIK, references are not used in an abstract text, instead reference
   an RFC as text, e.g., "RFC 8444 and RFC 8401".
   - rules for introducing abbreviations (Section 3.6 RFC 7322
   <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7322#section-3.6>) explain that:

   Abbreviations should be expanded in document titles and upon first
   use in the document.  The full expansion of the text should be
   followed by the abbreviation itself in parentheses.

Several cases, e.g., BAR and IPA, don't follow that rule.


   - BFR (Section 2) needs expansion on the first use.
   - s/a IPA/an IPA/
   - s/a RCRA/an RCRA/
   - s/with semantics/ with the semantics/
   - s/are augmented/is augmented/
   - s/secuity/security/
   - s/thanks/thank/


Regards,
Greg