Hi Remco,
Frustration can be a good driver for change, but the question is: how
high is everyone's tolerance for breakage, and who gets to put up with
the consequences?
A couple of years ago, several of us started out in the DB Task Force
with chain saws revving and ready for action, but we walked out with a
strong sense that evolution was a better approach than revolution.
I don't think, incidentally, that there's a problem making smaller
changes of the sort that Marco is proposing, and in fact changes like
this are much needed and would be much appreciated. The reason I
suggested breaking things out into separate updates is that kitchen sink
proposals are often a nuisance to handle and non-contentious changes end
up being blocked by other changes. This is not a good use of peoples'
time or resources.
Nick
Remco van Mook wrote on 08/09/2026 14:05:
Hi all,
actually I'd argue the opposite (as I already did at AP during RIPE89:
https://ripe89.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/83-ripe-89-address-policy.pdf
I think discussions in AP over the last years have shown that our
current set of policies is now so hard to have a common understanding
about and so hard to actually produce updates for, that I think we'd
do very well to go and turn our current policy stack, how the NCC
interprets those policies, the NWIs, and an all-over harmonisation of
terms into a single consistent policy manual, ARIN style. It would
also help us to finally get an actual definition of 'assignment' in
the IPv6 context.
If it's not feasible at this point to do a rewrite, waiting longer
will certainly not make matters better. The observation that even
minor changes have a chance to cause a major ripple in the reading of
our current policy set demonstrates the predicament we're in. If
seasoned policy experts have trouble getting this right at this point,
how can we expect any newcomers to make a contribution?
Kind regards
Remco
On 8 Sep 2026, at 14:40, James Kennedy via address-policy-wg
<[email protected]> wrote:
As a general comment,
my inclination would either be to do a complete top-down rewrite of
specific documents, or else approach rewrites with changes only to
small
areas. Otherwise you end up with the risk of minor changes derailing
other, and potentially more important, changes.
I tend to favour the latter. A complete top-down rewrite of RIPE
policy documents sounds tempting but I'm not sure how feasible that
would be in practice.
Either way, even minor changes must have their impact on existing
policies properly identified and taken into account. On mitigating
the risk of derailing other ongoing changes, I trust the WG chairs to
coordinate that with the proposers :)
Best,
James
From: Nick Hilliard <[email protected]>
To: "Marco Schmidt"<[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]"<[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:05:53 +0100
Subject: [address-policy-wg] Re: Feedback for potential policy
proposal on IPv6
Marco Schmidt wrote on 08/09/2026 06:07:
The main points I raised were the lack of a general reference to the
audit procedure in the IPv6 policy, and the wording of the section
dealing with policy compliance and non-compliance, which has remained
unchanged since 2002 and might be difficult to understand without the
historical context.
for sure, the existing section of policy that you quoted is not well
written and doesn't look like it reflects how ipv6 address resources
are
handled. It would benefit from a rewrite.
In terms of other RIPE policy document changes, there's no shortage of
material that could be improved: many of the documents are the product
of organic growth, and show all the signs of it. As a general comment,
my inclination would either be to do a complete top-down rewrite of
specific documents, or else approach rewrites with changes only to
small
areas. Otherwise you end up with the risk of minor changes derailing
other, and potentially more important, changes.
Nick
-----
To unsubscribe from this mailing list or change your subscription
options, please visit:
https://mailman.ripe.net/mailman3/lists/address-policy-wg.ripe.net/
As we have migrated to Mailman 3, you will need to create an account
with the email matching your subscription before you can change your
settings.
More details at:
https://www.ripe.net/membership/mail/mailman-3-migration/
-----
To unsubscribe from this mailing list or change your subscription
options, please visit:
https://mailman.ripe.net/mailman3/lists/address-policy-wg.ripe.net/
As we have migrated to Mailman 3, you will need to create an account
with the email matching your subscription before you can change your
settings.
More details at:
https://www.ripe.net/membership/mail/mailman-3-migration/
-----
To unsubscribe from this mailing list or change your subscription options,
please visit:
https://mailman.ripe.net/mailman3/lists/address-policy-wg.ripe.net/
As we have migrated to Mailman 3, you will need to create an account with the email matching your subscription before you can change your settings.
More details at: https://www.ripe.net/membership/mail/mailman-3-migration/
