Re: [RTG-DIR] RTG-DIR QA review of draft-ietf-babel-rfc6126bis-04.txt

[Juliusz Chroboczek <[e-mail]>]

Dear Susan,

Thank you very much for the kind words, and thank you for your review.
Unfortunately, I cannot help but be somewhat puzzled.  As it currently
stands, your review is not likely to help us improve the document.

If I read your review right, it consists of three parts.

In a first part, you comment about the lack of discussion of management.
Rfc6126bis has a very precise scope: it defines the on-the-wire protocol
and associated algorithms in a way that is sufficiently precise to enable
independent reimplementation of the protocol in an interoperable way
without overly restricting implementers' freedom.  It has arguably been
successful with this goal: there are currently three independent,
interoperable implementations of RFC 6126, at least two of which have been
independently updated to comply with rfc6126bis.

The Babel community has done a significant amount of work on management of
Babel networks in a wide range of very different environments, some of it
within the IETF, some of it outside, some of it publicly available, some
of it proprietary.  I would be interested in discussing Babel management
issues with you and Barbara in a separate mail exchange, or even on the
mailing list.

However, management issues are out of scope for rfc6126bis, which deals
with the on-the-wire protocol only.  Hence, your comments about management
in your review of rfc6126bis are somewhat puzzling to me, and do not help
us improve the document.
 
In a second part, you comment about Section 2, the conceptual overview of
the protocol, and mention that it is incomplete.  I have re-read this part
carefully, and I think that it is perfectly clear that this part is not
meant to be exhaustive; for what it's worth, none of people independently
reimplementing Babel have been confused by that.  (As a matter of fact,
you missed the most important simplification that's done in that section
-- we use a mesh model there, rather than the more complicated but more
realistic link model used on the Internet and hence used by the protocol
description in Section 3.)

I think that it is important that Section 2 remains concise and readable.
Hence, I disagree with your comments about triggerred updates or technical
details of the packet format needing to be described in Section 2.  Doing
that would not improve the document.

In a third part of your review, you make a fairly large number of comments
about particular issues you have with this document.  Unfortunately, your
comments range from incomplete ("but I am not sure you’ve caught all the
problems") through cryptic ("however the details are not there") to
somewhat enigmatic ("there is no list in the beginning on what
algorithms").  While we can guess in many cases what you mean, I don't
think that this list is precise enough for us to work with in order to
improve rfc6126bis.

Dear Susan, I realise that you are a busy person.  However, I would like
to strongly encourage you to send us another review, one that fits the
scope of rfc6126bis and is precise and detailed enough to help us improve
the document.

Thank you very much for your help,

-- Juliusz