Re: WG Review: Recharter of Multiprotocol Label Switching (mpls)

[Pekka Savola <pekkas@netcore.fi>]

Hi,

Added ops-dir to Cc:.  First, I had ietf@ietf.org, but that would probably 
have resulted in a flame-fest which probably would not have been useful.

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, The IESG wrote:
>    Multiprotocol Label Switching (mpls)
>    -------------------------------------
> 
>    Current Status: Active Working Group
> 
>    Description of Working Group:
> [...]
> 
>    The first generation of the MPLS standards are largely complete,
>    and the current WG work items are:
> 
>    - procedures and protocols for multicast protocol extensions for
>        point-to-multipoint TE, including soft-preemption
> [...]
> 
>    - MPLS-specific aspects of traffic engineering for multi-areas/multi-AS
>        in cooperation with the CCAMP WG
> [...]

Is it really, really appropriate to keep continue extending the MPLS 
efforts far beyond the original applicability?  These two particular 
new proposed charter items seem very worrisome to me:

 - methods such as point-to-multipoint TE are very likely to make the 
architecture much more complex than it currently is.  Do we *really* want 
to go there?

 - multi-area/multi-AS traffic engineering is a huge problem, are we sure 
we want to try to get one, solution-specific WG try to address it, as an 
afterthought?  Seems to be a guaranteed mechanism to have it fail, or 
produce irrelevant results.

Perhaps this is an uphill battle, but if folks have concerns about 
extending the protocols further, I guess they should be made *NOW*, before 
the work gets chartered and "sanctioned by the IETF".

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings