Re: [Idr] WGLC is for "BGP Router Capabilities Attribute” [was: Re: WG LC for draft-ietf-idr-entropy-09 (8/29 to 9/12/2023)]

[John Scudder <[e-mail]>]

To report back and distill the main and side conversations, I think at the moment the straw man proposal is:

Title: Next-Hop Dependent Capabilities (NHC)

This varies just a little from Jeff’s suggestion of “Next-Hop Capabilities”, the rationale being to try to highlight the fact that the capability should not be understood as the capability of the next-hop, but rather a capability of the path, that depends on the ability of the next-hop to support it. Maybe adding “dependent” won’t help to clarify this, but maybe it will, and anyway, it’s good to try. You’ll recognize this as one of the candidate names reported at the October 2022 meeting and also the name used by draft-ietf-idr-next-hop-capability… and so we come full circle.

Filename: I don’t think I saw a clear consensus or mandate to either change or retain the filename. If we were going to change it, the straw man would be “draft-ietf-idr-nhc”, and not the more obvious "draft-ietf-idr-next-hop-capability”, because draft-ietf-idr-next-hop-capability-08 is a predecessor of this version, and filename reuse seems like it would be an unnecessary and gratuitous torture test of the Datatracker infrastructure.

There are cons to either choice:

Change the filename:
- The “search lists” button in Datatracker won’t have the expected result of finding this WGLC thread. 
- As Tom Petch points out it violates POLA [1] and risks confusion down the line — all correctable by pointing people at the history in Datatracker, but it’s still liable to happen and create overhead. 

Keep the filename:
- This violates the principle that the filename should have an obvious association with the title of the spec, and may also create confusion during later review (IETF LC, area directorates, IESG).

On the balance I lean 51% toward “keep the filename” but I’m comfortable with whatever consensus emerges.

—John

[1] The Principle Of Least Astonishment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

> On Sep 7, 2023, at 5:15 PM, John Scudder <jgs=[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> [External Email. Be cautious of content]
> 
> 
> Hi Jeff,
> 
>> On Sep 7, 2023, at 3:08 PM, Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>> Speaking as an individual contributor, I also think next-hop-capabilit(ies) better reflects the proposal.
> 
> I don’t have any objection to a name change. Slide 9 of https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/interim-2022-idr-04/materials/slides-interim-2022-idr-04-sessa-bgp-entropy-label-capability-version-3-00__;!!NEt6yMaO-gk!GZO8zL7ANbu91AB2XRyVdBz6qnOwlIwLkvd2LURvGRmPP8H41yUbUXQ4pofDXMxOGGd5XSpYwYgBJPip0GJ_v753lqTt$  (from the October 2022 interim) lists some of the other options we considered:
> 
>        • Next-Hop Dependent Capabilities (NHC)
>        • Next-Hop Capabilities Attribute (NHC)
>        • Transitive BGP Router Capabilities (TBRC)
>        • Forwarding (Plane) Capabilities Attribute (F[P]CA)
> 
> Let’s see if a consensus rename arises in this WGLC, but I for one am OK with the stake in the ground being “NHC”.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> —John
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