Re: Last Call: 'Assigning Experimental and Testing Numbers Considered Useful' to BCP

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

Hi Henrik.

Thanks for the comment. I've added the following text to the
document. Specifically, a new section heading, a new intro paragraph
and a new third paragraph. Let me know what you think!

New text:

.NH 2
Recommendation for Protocols
.in +3

To make it possible to experiment with protocol extensions safely,
protocol documents should consider reserving a small set of protocol
numbers for experimentation. Such reservations can be made through an
explicite reservation in an IANA Considerations section.

The exact number of values to reserve for experimentation will depend
on the specific protocol and factors specific to that protocol. For
example, in cases where the values of a field are subdivided into
ranges that are treated differently (e.g., "silently ignore"
vs. "return an error" if the value is not understood), one or more
values from each sub-range may need to be reserved.

For protocols that return error codes, it may also be appropriate to
reserve a small number of experimental error values that can be used
in conjunction with possible experimental uses. For example, an
experimental message might result (even under normal conditions) in an
error, with a special error code (or sub-code) indicating the type of
error condition.


Henrik Levkowetz <henrik@levkowetz.com> writes:


> In the Mip4 wg we have recently been working on a draft to allocate
> experimental numbers for MIPv4 based on above document. 

> One realization which came to us quite late was that allocation of
> experimental protocol numbers might for some experiments be of limited
> use unless there also are one or more experimental error-codes available
> to signal new error condition(s) that may occur with the new experimental
> protocol numbers.

> This point might warrant explicit mention in the document.