Re: Identifier (structure) [Was: Agenda for Vienna]

[Brian E Carpenter <brian@hursley.ibm.com>]

Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
...
> 
> One comment on the endpoint thing: this brings up the interesting
> question whether we care about the nature of the item being identified
> by an identifier. Does it matter whether an identifier points to a
> host, a process, a service or an interface? Those have different
> properties, but each may act as an endpoint at some point in time.

This is why the NSRG decided to focus on the "stack" as the entity
to be identified (and located). For an IP address, the stack is
the right level, for reasons that the NSRG draft explains.

My opinion is that IPv6 addresses are fine both as stack identifiers
and stack locators, and that identifiers and locators should *not*
be syntactically distinguished - we will simply know from context 
whether we are using an address as an identifier, a locator, or both.

Anything else takes us off into computer science discussions, and I don't
think that is a good use of our time. (In fact, that is why the NSRG
took so long to come up with a draft, which isn't even a consensus.)

   Brian