Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2002 09:01:52 -0400
From: Keith Moore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| I've come to the opposite conclusion - that it's completely unreasonable
| to expect apps (or hosts) to assume the burdens of:
Keith, what matters is that unless the burdens (and their underlying
causes) are removed, someone has to do it.
Of course, everyone would prefer that it be someone else, and not "me"
but regardless of that, the burden remains, and has to be dealt with
somehow.
All the points you made about the problems that exist are valid, but
unfortunately we can't simply wish them away. Like it or not, the nature
of the net has changed in the past 20 years, and "it was better 20
years ago" is not a useful thing to say.
It would be nice to go back in time, or perhaps better stated, to revert
the protocols to all work the way they did then - but the reasons that
things changed haven't gone away. That's largely that the net got a lot
bigger, and what we had 20 years ago simply didn't scale well.
Now it doesn't actually matter whether it is the apps that deal with this,
or something else lower down the stack - in the API (library routines
or whatever), in the transport stacks, or even in the network layer, though
down that low seems to be too low - there's no enough idea about the needs
of the application down there, so bad choices would be made as often as
good ones.
But something has to deal with temporary addresses, as these days, *all*
(global) addresses are temporary, and trying to pretend otherwise is folly.
The only difference between one kind of temporary address and another is
the expected validity period.
Something has to cope with that, and as long as apps keep looking at addresses
at all, it seems that the apps have to be able to handle this complication.
Having the apps just keep on pretending that the world hasn't changed in the
past 20 years is doing a disservice to everyone.
kre
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