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Re: Problem with draft-ops-endpoint-mib-05.txt


[I have CC'ed this to the <mibs@ops.ietf.org> list so that people
 know what is going on.]

>>>>> Brian Zill writes:

Brian> There's a problem with the specification of the "textual
Brian> convention" of IPv6 addresses, namely that the convention for
Brian> including a scope id value with an IPv6 address is not
Brian> standardized yet.  There's an outstanding ipngwg draft on this
Brian> issue, however, as a result of feedback to the authors, the
Brian> proposed format has been changed (just yesterday, actually) to
Brian> put the scope id field before the address portion, and the
Brian> delimiter changed to '%'.

I see two issues here:

(1) The delimiter character:

    I am happy to put '%' into the final version if this is what the
    IPng people prefer. (We actually expected to get comments on the
    character which is in the current draft. ;-)

(2) Moving the scope id before the address portion:

    This is problematic since this TC is for both, global and
    non-global IPv6 addresses. Due to the way DISPLAY-HINTS work (RFC
    2579), you can only have optional parts at the end of the
    underlying OCTET STRING. I also believe that the current version
    gives a more natural order and leads to fewer special cases since
    I expect that global IPv6 addresses >> non-global IPv6 addresses.

Brian> Of course, it's questionable to put any format for specifying a
Brian> scope id with an IPv6 address into another working group's
Brian> draft before the ipngwg decides upon a format.  Because until
Brian> that happens, it's not guaranteed that it won't change yet
Brian> again.

The delimiter character is not a big deal. It is nothing which defines
on the wire behaviour nor is it mandatory to use the DISPLAY-HINT for
rendering values. So even if we have to change the delimiter later on,
there will be no real interoperability problem.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <URL:http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>