Re: [homenet] Configuration must not be carried by the routing protocol

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Jun 26, 2013, at 1:42 PM, Mark Townsley <[e-mail]> wrote:
> DHCPv6 PD has been referred to by one of its co-authors as "a Fax replacement", so that the user doesn't have to type in his prefix sent to him in printed form from his ISP. I think that analogy was given to sway anyone away from trying to rely on it for more than a very long-lived, essentially static, value from an ISP. 

I find this sort of report remarkably unhelpful in making design decisions.   Like all IETF consensus documents, the DHCPv6-PD document is a product of the working group and, ultimately, the IETF.   An opinion expressed by one author at one time during the development of the document provides us with little guidance as to how to interpret the document in the present.   What's in the document should stand on its own.   Certainly current use cases treat DHCPv6-PD as dynamic, not static, for varying values of dynamic right up to "forced renumbering every day."

I also find statements like "the IETF has a configuration protocol, it is DHCP" to be unhelpful, because it's even less grounded in any consensus process.   But let's not fight fire with fire—I think most people reading this statement would have the same reaction to it that we do.   Certainly, a working group chair who used a statement like this as part of a consensus determination would be making a grievous error!