> If site locals were made to go away, they'd simply be re-invented by > sites all over the place, in totally un-coordinated ways, and the same > pressures that led to reserving the 1918 address space will just > reappear.
Just because people do something that we feel is unwise, doesn't mean we should encourge such behavior (either explicitly, or by silence). Saying "don't do that" is one of the things that the IETF can do. If the real feeling here is that site locals are bad if they end up reproducing some of the same problems as private addresses, then we should produce documents that explain when site-locals can safely be used (i.e., an applicability statement that describes when the IETF recommends their use). For other uses that people imagine (or that we expect they will imagine), but for which we think is a bad idea, we should say *why* its a bad idea *and* we should suggest a better way of doing it, so that folks who have a particular problem can choose an appropriate solution. For example, we could arrange to allow sites to obtain globally unique address space (though non-routable globally) if they want it for internal numbering. That would address some of the issues that private addresses of led to. Note that this is something we can't do in IPv4 because there just aren't enough address for this; IPv6 doesn't have that constraint. Thomas -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
