Re: proposed text for charter

[Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@piuha.net>]

Hi Thomas,

> > o  ULIDs will be actual IP addresses, permitting existing applications to
> >   continue to work unchanged, and permitting application referrals to
> >   work, as long as the IP Addresses are available.
> >    
>
> I'm not sure I understand what this means.
>
> what does "as long as the IP Address are available" mean? Is this
> trying to say anything other than "if packets can still be sent from A
> to B (using whatever addresses happen to work) referrals will also
> work"? Or is there some other subtle restriction here?
>  
Yes. The "addresses are available" part has to do with what
has been envisioned as the solution in MULTI6. If you use
real IP addresses as your ULIDs then we minimize changes
to applications and make it possible to have referrals. However,
the drawback of this approach is that if one such address (set)
is stored and later retrieved by an application, that address
still has to work (or one address from the set) or otherwise
you can't continue, because you have no way of asking the
peer what his new address is.

(Note that the value of this item in the charter may also not
be immediately obvious. Why are we saying that referrals
work without application changes? Isn't that a detail?
The answer is that this particular choice of requirement
happens to dictate to some extent what kind of solution
is needed. For instance, if this were not a requirement
then identifiers would probably look more like HITs than
HBAs/CGAs. Of course the choice of the particular requirement
set is a tradeoff -- some NAT/IPv4 things would probably be
easier if this were not a requirement.)

--Jari