Re: I-D Action: draft-ietf-6man-ipv6only-flag-03.txt

[Philip Homburg <[e-mail]>]

>There is currently no evidence of any vendor interest in implementing support 
>for the flag.

I wondered about that myself. I don't like this draft at all, but the
bigger question is who is actually going to implement this?

There is benefit for battery powered devices, but I haven't seen any vendor
of mobile devices stand up and say that they will implement it. And my guess
is that any dev team will find more robust ways of saving battery power than
relying on this option.

At the same time, if room full of operators at a RIPE meeting say they have no
need for this option, then who is going to set it on routers?

>From a technical point of view, if nobody implements the flag, it doesn't do 
any harm.

Beyond a narrow technical view, it does harm. It makes the total IPv6 protocol
bigger, so harder to analyse, harder for people to learn about IPv6 or to
teach others.