Re: DNP for draft-song-pppext-sip-support-02.txt

[Thomas Narten <narten@us.ibm.com>]

> This may be splitting hairs, but....

Something we love to do...

> was the WG opposed to *taking this up as a WG item (because they thought it 
> was useless)* or opposed to *it being published at all (because they 
> thought it was harmful)*? The note (which is what I have to go from) was 
> unclear.

The WG has a long history of saying no to extensions of questionable
merit. This document is just the latest example. The WG views PPP
options as being OK for negotiating PPP (i.e., link-specific)
parameters. They have long been opposed to allowing PPP to do things
like negotiate DNS, routing, and other generic IP parameters where
other protocols (e.g, DHC) do the trick (better). DHC works fine for
this they say.

RFC 1877 (PPP Internet Protocol Control Protocol Extensions for Name
Server Addresses) is an interesting data point. It allows for
communicating the address of a DNS server. The document is
informational (not standards track) and the WG has long complained
that even that was a mistake. They don't want to repeat it.

Note that this WG has some vocal/principled members that speak up on
this regularly. Karl Fox (the chair), Vern Schryver, Bernard Aboba,
James Carlson come to mind. Frankly, I wish other WGs had more members
that would speak up like this and say no.

> > If the answer is "no", how can the IETF push back on abuse of its
> > protocols?

> How do we tell the difference between "abuse", "legitimate proprietary 
> extension" and "other opinion"?
> With great difficulty, I think....

In this case, the WG too is saying "abuse" and "no". I agree. That
makes it easy in this case, IMO.

Thomas