Barry Leiba has entered the following ballot position for draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums-04: Discuss
When responding, please keep the subject line intact and reply to all email addresses included in the To and CC lines. (Feel free to cut this introductory paragraph, however.) Please refer to http://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html for more information about IESG DISCUSS and COMMENT positions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCUSS: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a combined DISCUSS on udpchecksums and udpzero. First, let me say that I have no actual objection to publishing either of these documents. What I'm concerned about is whether we're saying what we want to stay as a "standard", so let's discuss that: The issue comes when I look at udpzero Section 5.1 and udpchecksums section 5. The numbered list in the latter is essentially a word-for-word copy of the numbered list in the former, with the "must"s and "may"s and "should not"s changed to upper case. It always bothers me when a significant amount of important text is duplicated like that, but the real problem comes when I look at what this *says*. Because udpzero is informational, when it says, "If a zero checksum approach were to be adopted by the IETF, the specification should consider adding the following constraints on usage," that makes no normative requirement on any future protocol that runs on UDP and decides to bypass the UDP checksums. Now, of course, we also have a document, udpchecksums, which defines what to do if you do tunneling on UDP and you want to skip the outer checksums (because you have inner ones). *That* document makes this list normative. But what happens if, later, someone decides to document how to do, let's say, media streaming over UDP with zero checksums. The analysis in udpzero applies, of course, but the new document is under no obligation to consider it or any of those usage restrictions in Section 5.1. (It might be that such a document could never get past the current community and ADs, but I'm not sure we want to leave that to chance.) So the question comes to what we want to say normatively. Which is it that we want a standard saying? 1. If you tunnel packets over UDP and want to avoid the UDP checksums, you need to use this list of restrictions. But other applications over UDP that want to avoid the UDP checksums can make entirely different decisions. or 2. If you do *anything* over UDP and want to avoid the UDP checksums, you need to use this list of restrictions. And here's how tunneling over UDP works. I think (2) is right, but the way the documents are structured now says (1). Discussion, please.... -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
