[Idr] Debate about IANA assignment policies for BGP-LS registries

[Adrian Farrel <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

You may have noticed some recent debate about
draft-ietf-idr-bgp-ls-registries on the IDR list.

It is possible that, notwithstanding WG last call, the draft doesn't
correctly capture what the working group wanted.

Since I hold the pen for the draft and am one of the Designated Experts for
the registry, I will try to set out my understanding of what we currently
have, what the document says, and what questions the WG may need to address
next.

[For the avoidance of doubt: I'm just trying to serve the WG and clarify the
instructions to the DEs, I don't have much of an opinion about this.]

The registries were created by RFC 7752 and currently make assignments
according to "Specification Required." RFC 8126 (which post-dated RFC 7752)
defines these terms in section 4.6. "Specification Required" includes the
requirement for:
- review by a Designated Expert
- documentation in a permanent and readily available public specification

Debate rages about the meaning of "permanent" in this context. Does an
Internet-Draft count, does it expire, or is it archived by the tools page?
Does an individual I-D count, or does it need to be adopted first? Does IANA
track the I-D version, and if not what does it mean when a new version
changes the meaning of a code point?

As Alvaro, our AD remarks, IDR is not the place to have this debate. It is
probably an IETF-wide debate and anyone is welcome to take it up with IANA
and the IESG.

What we need to do is decide what we want as our policy for these registries
to be, and then work out how to achieve it. We can then set the DE guidance
(see section 5.1 of RFC 7752) to achieve the right results.

It seems, from various discussions on the list, that the WG (or some of its
more vocal participants) want to be able to assign code points based on I-Ds
and without requiring to do early allocation (RFC 7120). There seem (to me)
to be three ways to approach this:

1. Leave the assignment policies and DE instructions in place per 7752 and
state that they do what we want.
2. Leave the assignment policies in place per 7752, but change the DE
instructions to give explicit advice about Internet-Drafts.
3. Change the assignment policies to be simply "Expert Review" and change
the DE instructions to describe what the DE must do.

The current draft seeks to implement option 3.

I'd note that a secondary issue arises about requests for codepoints arising
from outside the IETF. Suppose another SDO or a vendor wants a code point:
Do they have to write an I-D? Does it have to gain adoption in the WG?



The chairs have a slide on this for the meeting on Friday. I'll leave it to
them to decide whether there is time in the meeting to discuss the topic,
but the agenda was previously full. Perhaps a discussion on this list would
be better.

Best,
Adrian