Re: [tcpm] TCP Long Options

>-----Original Message-----
>From: tcpm-bounces@ietf.org [mailto:tcpm-bounces@ietf.org] On 
>Behalf Of Adam Langley
>Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 2:28 PM
>
>On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 10:20 AM, Joe Touch <touch@isi.edu> wrote:
>> It might be worth reviewing the discussion on the TCP-LO when it was
>> previously presented, and provide a summary to the group as 
>to whether
>> anything has changed.
>
>Good point, although I am probably omitting salient points which I
>missed when reviewing the archives:
>
> ...
>

Based on my memory, Adam's summary is pretty accurate.  In 2005, the
reason that Bob Braden cited to me for not publishing the previous
version of this draft as Experimental was:

> Basically, the critical fact here is that TCP is a core protocol for
> the Internet, so any changes to it should go through the IETF process.
> We understand that there are competing proposals, and TCP does not
seem
> to be an area where competition is desirable.  Experimental
> implementations of your proposal would probably not be a good idea.

I guess the real problem was that the TCPM group didn't ever get
consensus that working on any long options mechanism was important,
so it never got done as a WG item, and it couldn't be done as an
independent submission RFC because TCP is a core protocol.  Thus,
4 years later, it is still not done, and I still get email every
few months from people that stumble upon the draft and want to use
it to enable some other experimental modification that requires a
really long option or two.  I think this is what happened with Adam.
He was working on another project, ran across the previous version
of the TCP Long Options draft, and discovered it was what he had been
reinventing.

In my personal opinion, it's a good idea to have some way to do
long options (any way, not necessarily even this draft) that's
at least published Experimental (off by default), simply because
different groups of people keep thinking they need long options.  I
think that's the point that the WG didn't have consensus on in the
past, and may or may not still lack.

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