Re: [tcpm] IANA TCP options registry

[Fernando Gont <[e-mail]>]

Joe Touch wrote:

> IANA tends to maintain as much registry information as they have, but
> only the specs or a general pointer is on the web page, AFAICT. That
> seems appropriate, as you note. If someone wants to contact the last
> known 'owner' (who registered it), they can contact IANA.

Exactly. That's why, e.g. in the case of the options 20-23, it would be
better to provide a pointer to the spec rather than an e-mail address
(in particular when the spec is publicly available, for free).



>>> Other information on current use isn't clearly appropriate IMO for
>>> either a doc or IANA tables, such as active use information.
>> I don't expect "usage" information with a granularity of one year or two
>> years, but at least I'd be interested in "usage" information with a more
>> coarse granularity (e.g., "was this ever deployed on the Internet?", "Is
>> it fair to assume that nobody is using this anymore?")
> 
> The IETF would take this on by declaring something Historic, 

You mean an RFC declaring those options as "Historic"?


> e.g. I
> don't think it's in IANA's charter to either make these assessments, and
> that seems like something that, while useful, isn't "IANA".

I may agree with that. However, the discussion here is two-fold:

* IANA registry not providing good pointers (IMO this should be fixed by
IANA, as described above)
* IANA not providing hints about the usage of many options. From your
comment, it seems this should be addressed by a Std. Track RFC?



>>> Putting up web pages with this "other" (IMO, non-IANA) info may be
>>> useful, but seems outside IANA's scope. I'm not sure who could maintain
>>> those pages, other than individuals on personal sites (which, given
>>> search engines, ought to be sufficient anyway).
>> I disagree with this. Yes, there are search engines. But they don't tell
>> you the accuracy of the information that they provide in their results.
> 
> No disagreement there, but individual pages can often have as useful
> information as those by organizations ;-)

For sure. But it's not a good sign if the most useful info is always
elsewhere ;-)



>> Secondly (and probably more importantly), why should we rely on some
>> external agent to provide this information??? Why should this useful
>> stuff need to be produced elsewhere?
> 
> I agree this info is useful in general. It doesn't seem appropriate for
> IANA to either collect or maintain that info. I'm not even sure the IETF
> would do this, except in the process of standards elevation/demotion.

I guess that at least with Informational RFCs, it could/should do it.



> I'm not saying it's not useful, but I just don't know who should "own"
> or "endorse" this - the Internet doesn't have a compliance or deployment
> monitoring function AFAICT.

It doesn't look good to have all this options assigned that nobody (*)
knows what they have been used for (if they have ever been used on the
public Internet).

(*) Clearly, some people probably know about them (as indicated by the
recent post by Christian Huitema). But this information should be easily
and publicly available.

Thanks,
-- 
Fernando Gont
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