[Gen-art] Gen-ART Last Call review of draft-ietf-bess-ir-04

Paul Kyzivat <pkyzivat@alum.mit.edu> Tue, 09 August 2016 20:41 UTC

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From: Paul Kyzivat <pkyzivat@alum.mit.edu>
To: draft-ietf-bess-ir.all@ietf.org
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Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2016 16:41:41 -0400
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Subject: [Gen-art] Gen-ART Last Call review of draft-ietf-bess-ir-04
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I am the assigned Gen-ART reviewer for this draft. The General Area 
Review Team (Gen-ART) reviews all IETF documents being processed by the 
IESG for the IETF Chair. Please treat these comments just like any other 
last call comments. For more information, please see the FAQ at 
<http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/area/gen/trac/wiki/GenArtfaq>.

Document: draft-ietf-bess-ir-04
Reviewer: Paul Kyzivat
Review Date: 2016-08-09
IETF LC End Date: 2016-08-10
IESG Telechat date: 2016-08-18

Summary:

Unfortunately, I don't have the expertise to review this draft.

(Of the review summaries available to me, the one I want to use is "This 
draft has serious issues, described in the review, and needs to be 
rethought." But I don't think I am in a position to make such a 
judgement given my lack of knowledge of the subject domain.)

Issues:

Major: 0
Minor: 2
Nits:  0

(1) MINOR:

Section 5 begins:

    As previously specified, when the "Tunnel Type" field of a PTA is set
    to "IR", the "Tunnel Identifier" field of that PTA does not contain
    the IR P-tunnel identifier.  This section specifies the procedures
    for setting the "Tunnel Identifier" field of the PTA when the "Tunnel
    Type" field of the PTA is set to "IR".

I have trouble parsing this so it makes sense. The problem is with "As 
previously specified". Normally when I see something like this I expect 
it to mean "previously within this document". I think in this case it 
means in RFCs 6513 and/or 6514. I think this ought to be clearer. E.g.,

    As specified in [RFC6513], ...

(2) MINOR (?!?):

Lacking any knowledge of the subject matter of this draft, I found it 
impossible to review in a meaningful way. But I tried!

I came to the tentative conclusion that this document is struggling to 
document an extremely complex system. In such a situation publishing the 
sort of documentation provided here is probably better than not doing 
so. But I fear it isn't sufficient - that it will be unlikely that a new 
implementer, schooled in the subject matter, will be able to create a 
correct implementation. The problem is with the system/algorithms, not 
with the document.

(NOTE: I've made this minor rather than major because I don't consider 
myself competent to say this is a real problem or if it is one that this 
draft should be expected to fix.)