Re: IPv6 woes - RFC

[John Curran <jcurran () istaff org>]

On 16 Sep 2021, at 11:33 AM, Masataka Ohta <mohta () necom830 hpcl titech ac jp> wrote:
> John Curran wrote:
>
> > If by "design choices" you mean the tradeoffs accepted in selecting a
> > particular candidate protocol and declaring victory, then I’d
> > strongly disagree.
>
> What actually happened is that SIP was chosen but modified
> by IPng directorates to pretend, for political purposes, IPng
> were a merger of all the proposals only to make the result
> totally unusable, during which address length was extended
> from 8B to 16B to accommodate so infamous XNS style auto
> configuration.

Masataka - You are correct, in that the design choices made for the final “IPng" weren’t actually any of the proposals 
as submitted, but rather an interesting compromise creation. 

(My negative answer to Eliot’s "There is no evidence that any other design choices on the table at the time would have 
gotten us transitioned any faster, and a lot of evidence and analysis that the exact opposite is more likely” was 
simply noting that the design choices made about the “straightforward transition plan" was effectively to punt – i.e. 
despite lacking one, choosing declare victory anyway and leave it as an exercise for the reader.  It’s fairly obvious 
that different choices here could have made a very significant difference in IPng deployment trajectory.) 

Thanks,
/John

Disclaimer:  my views alone - (no one else would wanted them…)