Re: [RTG-DIR] Routing area directorate early (QA) review of draft-ietf-babel-applicability

[Juliusz Chroboczek <[e-mail]>]

Dear Sasha,

Thank you very much for your review.  These comments are very helpful, and
I wish I had had your guidance when I first drafted this document.

While there are some minor points I wish to discuss with you (I'll CC the
list when I do), I'll jump to the conclusions right now.  You suggest the
following three changes:

> - A reasonably detailed technical overview of BABEL in the draft based on a
> similar overview in the base spec

This sounds like a good idea, assuming that the technical introduction
does not need to be removed from 6126bis.  I like the technical
introduction in 6126bis.

> - Some level of detail about the networks where BABEL has been successfully
> deployed – where information is available and can be published without causing
> unnecessary conflicts

I'm not going to reply to this before I've at least attempted to gather
suitable data, but for now I'll just mention that:

  - in some cases, the data is easily available, or can be obtained
    without too much effort, and could be added to the document;
  - in some cases, the data is available in the peer-reviewed papers cited
    in the draft, and I'm not sure of the propriety of copy-pasting the
    results;
  - in other cases, the data is not easily available, or is available but
    cannot be published due to people having funny ideas about intellectual
    property (I'd name some names, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to);
  - in yet other cases, the data is simply not known, for many reasons, the
    main of which being that we haven't built an event-driven simulator
    for Babel yet.  (Let him who enjoys ns3 cast me the first stone.)

> - Information about actual impact of de-aggregation of routes on
> black-holing in existing BABEL deployments. If such impact has not been
> observed, a mere statement of the fact would suffice, of course.

As you justly guessed, we know that we don't know how to do automatic
aggregation/deaggregation in Babel, so we don't do it.  I'm planning to
work on that, since I believe it would be useful to at least three of the
major users of Babel.

Thanks again for your review,

-- Juliusz