Conclusion of Adoption Call for <draft-troan-6man-universal-ra-option>

[Bob Hinden <[e-mail]>]

The adoption call for this draft officially ended on 6 September 2021.  The discussion continued after that.  As of today, there were about 130 responses to the adoption call.

While some of the discussion was about adopting the draft and its merits, a lot was not.   It ended up moving into several general discussions of RAs vs. DHCPv6 repeating discussions that have happened multiple times over the years.

My conclusion is that while there is some interest in taking this work in 6MAN, based on the email discussion, this draft raises more issues that it solves.   The issues raised are not ones that have straightforward technical solutions and can be fixed in a revised draft, but are larger architectural issues.  It is not clear there could be a path toward a consensus to later advance this document given these issues (RFC 7221 section 2.2).

The draft's main goal of making it possible to define new options for RAs and DHCPv6 without IETF standardization, may result in more ways of doing host configuration, instead of unifying it (as least for some very long transition period).

Also, worth noting that since this would be creating common options for DHCPv6, this would also need discussion and agreement in the DHC working group.

My personal view is that while it is a reasonable goal to make it easier to create new RA and DHCP options and reduce the debate on standardizing these, the other issues this approach raises are problems that are much harder for the IETF to solve given the range of views expressed on the list.

Based on the adoption call discussion, prior to this draft being reconsidered in 6MAN (and probably with DHC) it would be constructive to develop a separate document specifying what kinds of options should be created for RA and for DHCPv6.    It should answer questions like where there could be duplication of options, and where there should not be duplication, providing information to all hosts on a link vs per host information, etc.    Draft <draft-troan-6man-universal-ra-option> mentions this topic, but doesn’t provide any specific guidance.   There would be a lot of value in a new document that specifies this.

I also think that this document made it clear we need to address the issues with new RA and DHCPv6 options, the hard issues are not the format or encoding of these options.  If the 6MAN working group can accomplish that, then new kinds of RA and DHCPv6 options will be easier to create regardless of the mechanism used to do that.

In summary, <draft-troan-6man-universal-ra-option> is not adopted at this time.

Bob
6MAN Chair