Re: [Pppext] warning suggestions for draft-bberry-pppoe-credit

[James Carlson <[e-mail]>]

Karl Fox writes:
> Broken.  Yes, I said broken.  PPPoE is broken.  A PPP-over-Ethernet- 
> over-radio design that needs new options to work properly is, by  
> definition, also broken.  Broken because the designers designed their  
> product improperly.  And now they want us to accept their broken  
> design as OK by standardizing it.

Agreed; the whole thing is swilly.

However, I disagree with that last bit.  The only intent here is to
publish as Informational (not Standards Track), and to make sure it's
specified to be minimally harmful.

In an ideal world, we would have been able to argue the authors away
from this split-termination design.  There wouldn't have been any
issue here at all, and no draft to write.  However, we haven't quite
managed to do that, and they've asked the IESG to publish.

In an ideal world, the IETF wouldn't have a vanity press feature such
as Informational.  Instead, we'd just tell people working on things
that are tangential (or inimical) to our agreed-on technical direction
to go find or form another standards body.  However, the IETF does
have this feature, and we've got some built-in limits to what we can
stop.

I agree it's not pretty, but I think we're getting the best of world
that we can have.  The authors were directed here to get input from
folks who know these protocols, even though they were under little
obligation to do so.  They got the input and may be mostly
disregarding it, but at least the resulting document will have an
appropriate warning.

-- 
James Carlson, KISS Network                    <[e-mail]>
Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive         71.232W   Vox [phone]
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax [phone]

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