Re: WGLC for draft-ietf-bfd-unaffiliated-echo (ending 7 April, 2023)

[Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]>]

Aijun,


> On Apr 4, 2023, at 5:28 AM, Aijun Wang <[e-mail]> wrote:
> From the description of this document, the state machine of local device is
> conformed that described in RFC5880, the main standard parts of this
> document are the contents of related fields within the BFD ECHO Packet. If
> so, I suggested to point out these fields and its value in more explicit
> manner, to facilitate the implementation interoperability.

Perversely, the fact that this mechanism has an implementation "talking to itself" means the interoperability considerations are not a primary issue.

Providing additional detail to help illustrate the mechanism would be in-scope and perhaps helpful.  Did you have any explicit recommendations for the text?

> Should the section 2(update to RFC5880) be moved afterwards the section
> 3(Unaffiliated BFD Echo Procedures)? 
> And I am worrying that is it easy for the reader/implementer to keep up with
> the updated contents in current manner, because they must compare the two
> documents simultaneously? 

I agree that this would be a helpful change.  It would move the procedure ahead of the changes that impact the BFD normative text.

> 
> Is there any other better style to point out the update to RFC5880?

Unfortunately, this is a common problem for internet-drafts that impact protocol state machinery.  We have either the option of trying to issue a "patch" on the draft, as we're doing here, or do a -bis of the base RFC to more cleanly integrate the changes.

Since I think this feature is best documented as an optional extension at this time, the "patch" format is our best option.

-- Jeff