Re: [Idr] RFC 4684 pedantry - routes with no Route Target

["John G. Scudder" <[e-mail]>]

Jeff,

On May 21, 2014, at 11:52 AM, Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Chairs, presuming that we do end up with that sort of behavioral consensus
> about no RT's, is an errata against RFC 4684 sufficient or would you want to
> see something more?

http://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/errata-processing.html has some guidance for how to handle proposed errata. I think it’s hard to argue that this oversight in 4684 (that it’s silent on the subject of routes that have no RTs) is an outright error — it’s an oversight. To make matters worse, the most obvious parsing of 4684 (to me, anyway) is that you should fail closed, not open as you propose. So the only item I see in the guidelines that might apply is:

	• Changes that modify the working of a protocol to something that might be different from the intended consensus when the document was approved should be either Hold for Document Update or Rejected. Deciding between these two depends on judgment. Changes that are clearly modifications to the intended consensus, or involve large textual changes, should be Rejected. In unclear situations, small changes can be Hold for Document Update.

That gives us the options of “hold for document update” or “rejected”. Neither one of those is what we want in order to actually update 4684, which is “verified”. So I think that, irrespective of what I want, we probably have to formally update 4684. For that matter, I’m not convinced that it’s obvious that there’s a real WG consensus on the proposed behavior. 

So, sorry, I do think it needs a draft of its own.

—John