Dear all, I've just published a new version of the Babel protocol specification:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-babel-rfc6126bis-02 This version containts some fairly major changes, the most notable being the addition of mandatory bits to the extension subprotocol. There have also been some fairly technical changes to the procedures for sending of requests, which should not invalidate any existing implementations. The mandatory bit makes the protocol more easily extensible by making it possible to explicitly encode the fact that an extension is not backwards compatible. It has greatly simplified the packet format of Matthieu Boutier's source-specific extension [1], and is used by Gwendoline Chouasne's TOS-specific extension [2]. [1] https://github.com/boutier/babeld/tree/dev [2] https://github.com/Gwendocg/babeldToS Both babeld and sbabeld have support for mandatory bits in their "mandatory" branches. I'll wait a few days to see if there are any flaws in this proposal, then merge into trunk. Please consider implementing mandatory bits if you have an implementation of Babel. The backwards compatibility of this change is reasonably strong, but somewhat weaker than what we at Babel Towers have been doing previously. More exactly: - new implementations of Babel will interoperate with old implementations as long as the former don't use any extensions that the latter don't understand; - new implementations of Babel that use the new extensions (new-style source-specific routing, TOS-specific routing) will not interoperate with old implementations, and might even create routing loops. We will refrain from deploying the new extensions until all implementations have acquired support for mandatory bits. Please read. Please think it over. Please comment. -- Juliusz _______________________________________________ Babel-users mailing list Babel-users@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/babel-users
