re: Appeal to the IAB on the site-local issue

[Scott Bradner <sob@harvard.edu>]

IAB,

Please consider this input for the IAB discussion on Tony's appeal of the
site local decision.  This should not be considered a separate appeal.
(Which I would think would have to start at the beginning with the working
group chairs.)

I do not have an opinion on the particulars of Tony's appeal since I was
not at the meeting in question and only followed the discussion on the
mailing list.  Nor is this an opinion based on the technical question under
discussion.  (Although I think some of the cures proposed to the site-local
disease are quite a bit worse than the disease itself.)

I would like to reiterate the concern I expressed on the mailing list back
in July - I think there may been a violation of the IETF consensus process 
in this case.

It is my opinion that there is a difference between a working group
deciding to adopt a technology and a working group deciding to delete a
technology from an existing IETF specification.  It is my opinion that the
second case should require a stronger demonstration of consensus to
change since the decision effects existing implementations, documentation,
text books etc.

But even without any need to show any extra level of consensus I did not
see that even a minimal level of rough consensus was demonstrated to remove
site local addresses.

The claim was made on the list that there was not consensus to keep site
local addresses, I think that is the wrong question to ask - the proposal
was to change a specification after its publication there should have been
a rough consensus to remove the feature.

I did not see rough consensus to do so based on my monitoring the list.

Scott

(this is the letter I sent back in July on the topic)

>From sob Mon Jul 28 15:11:01 2003
To: Erik.Nordmark@Sun.COM
Subject: Re: state-of-art SLs
Cc: ipng@sunroof.eng.sun.com
In-Reply-To: <Roam.SIMC.2.0.6.1059396655.12753.nordmark@bebop.france>


> The chairs have read all of the messages on the list, and based on your
> considerable input, we have determined that the IPv6 WG does have rough
> consensus to deprecate the usage of IPv6 site-local unicast addressing AND
> to investigate alternative mechanisms for local addressing and local access
. control.

humm - it is not all that often that we have said that 2/3 is rough
consensus in the IETF - in my exterience if 1/3 is not in support
then I would not claim consensus (even 6 grit) - 3/4 would be very
rough indeed, 5/6 would be the mininum I would say was "rough consensus"


just when does "rough consensus" faid out in this model?

Scott