Re: (multi6) requirements draft comments

["J. Noel Chiappa" <jnc@ginger.lcs.mit.edu>]

    > From: smd@ebone.net (Sean Doran)

    > PI and PA are absolutely _awful_ terms that should be uninvented in
    > favour of something that admits the truth that the optimal choice of
    > numbers is driven by MATH and not by economics, and would clear up
    > confusion among the various competing aggregation root and
    > number-assignment proposals.

I've always deeply hated the terms "provider-based", "provider-independent",
"provider-dependent", and their variants.

(I have this sneaky suspicion that they were invented by people who didn't
like some of the side-effects of CIDR, and tried [unsuccessfully] to stop it
by creating loaded terminology to make it sound bad.)

For the uninitiated (read "most of the world"), it makes it sound like it's
purely a policy decision as to whether addresses are PI or not, and so it's
"clear" to them that one should use PI, since the non-PI alternative provides
lock-in to the ogre providers...

I have tried to get people to use the term "connectivity-based", which is
simple and clear, and accurately conveys what's going on - which is that your
address is based on where you are connected. (This is actually also a more
accurate technical description, since it covers both provider-based and
exchange-based addressing systems [metro is an exchange-based system, BTW]).

However, I've had little luck. Perhaps it's worth another try now... ;-)

	Noel

PS: A side benefit of this is that "provider-independent addresses" becomes
"connectivity-independent addresses", which in its oxymoronicity gives an
immediate read on how silly the concept is. Kind of like "location
independent street address".