> The reason for having the explicit escape clause is that this rule has > been the subject of much discussion in the WG & IESG; some feel that > privacy is the overriding concern and some feel that application > compatibility is more important. We have a rough consensus to favor > application compatibility by default. But as a member of the privacy > camp, I think it's helpful to remind implementors that if in their > particular circumstances privacy is more important than app > compatibility, then they can prefer temporary addresses by default.
the point is that the host implementation is almost the worst possible place to override that default. the app knows what kind of addresses it needs, so it is in a good position to make such decisions. the user understands his own need for privacy, but he probably doesn't understand the implications of such a decision for his apps, so he's not in the best position. the host implementor knows even less than the user - unless you are talking about appliance hosts cannot be programmed by the user. in the latter situation the app implementor and the host implementor can be considered the same, and it's as easy for the app to select the proper kind of address than for the host implementor to do so. so I can really find no clear case for having the host implementor change the default. as you say, the SHOULD clause already allows an escape in the case where the host implementor clearly understands the implications of the decision - though that tends to require the host implementor to understand what apps will be run on the host, since the implications will vary from one app to another. on the other hand the MAY clause doesn't require the host implementor to understand those implications. it would therefore be better to remove the MAY clause entirely. Keith -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
