RE: [RRG] What does incremental deployment mean - 2 questions

[Randall Atkinson <rja@extremenetworks.com>]

Earlier, Robin Whittle wrote:
% Still, I think my definition:
%
%   (9)  Is the technology fully or widely deployable in a purely
%        incremental fashion?
%
%   For this to be true, the answer to
%
%   (6)  Do the benefits to each early adoptor depend on the
%        proportion of other users who have adopted it?
%
%   would have to be "no" (or perhaps "not to a strong degree").
%
% is a much more stringent and useful for the RRG than the definition
% which I think Tony used.

I disagree with all of the quoted text above, including the claim of
greater utility for the unusual definition above.

Among other things, that definition is significantly different from the IETF
community's common-use meaning for "incrementally deployable".  The
common meaning is that "incrementally deployable" is the inverse of
"flag day transition required".

I think Brian Carpenter captured the essence of the common meaning
for "incrementally deployable" when he talked about the ability of
an upgraded system to continue to communicate with non-upgraded
systems.  In short, the two key properties of incrementally deployable
are that

(A) Upgraded systems can use some mechanism to still communicate
     with non-upgraded systems (and non-upgraded systems can still
     communicate with upgraded systems using the older mechanisms).
(B) No Flag Day transition is required.

Ran
rja@extremenetworks.com


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