RE: Last Call on draft-ietf-pim-registry-03.txt

["Dearlove, Christopher (UK)" <[e-mail]>]

RFC 5226 (BCP 26) says

   IANA must be given a set of
   guidelines that allow it to make allocation decisions with minimal
   subjectivity and without requiring any technical expertise with
   respect to the protocols that make use of a registry.
 
and goes on to discuss categories of unassigned code points (though
it does also define the unqualified word Unassigned). We were thus
advised, when publishing RFC 5444, to specify this clearly and
so we had tables such as

       +---------+-----------------------+------------------------+
       |   Type  | Description           | Allocation Policy      |
       +---------+-----------------------+------------------------+
       |  0-127  | Unassigned            | Expert Review          |
       | 128-223 | Message-Type-specific | Reserved, see Table 11 |
       | 224-255 | Unassigned            | Experimental Use       |
       +---------+-----------------------+------------------------+

(For the purposes of this discussion I suggest ignoring the 128 to
223 line above.)

This seemed to keep everyone (IESG, IANA, RFC Editor) happy.

-- 
Christopher Dearlove
Technology Leader, Communications Group
Communications and Networks Capability
BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre
West Hanningfield Road, Great Baddow, Chelmsford, CM2 8HN, UK
Tel: [phone]  Fax: [phone]

BAE Systems (Operations) Limited
Registered Office: Warwick House, PO Box 87,
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Registered in England & Wales No: 1996687

-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of
Lars Eggert
Sent: 14 January 2011 08:23
To: Michelle Cotton
Cc: Julian Reschke; [e-mail]; Adrian Farrel; 'The IETF'
Subject: Re: Last Call on draft-ietf-pim-registry-03.txt

Hi,

On 2011-1-13, at 22:43, Michelle Cotton wrote:
> Many believe it makes it very clear to the users of the registry what
is
> available for assignment.  Something we will be rolling out soon (for
those
> registries with a finite space) will be small charts showing how much
of the
> registry space is unassigned, assigned and reserved (utilizing the
> unassigned entries).

I mentioned in the past that the term "unassigned" to me at least
doesn't make it sufficiently clear that IANA assignment is often needed
before codepoints may be taken into use. We have several cases (the many
different squats on TCP option numbers, for example) were people pick
unassigned codepoints during development and only later realize that
they should have registered them.

If you want to explicitly list unassigned codepoints in the registries,
I'm wondering if we can find a short phrase that makes it more clear
that an IANA action is normally required - maybe "available for IANA
assignment"?

Lars

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