On Nov 17, 2011, at 8:18 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> Ted,
> 
> On 2011-11-17 17:54, Ted Lemon wrote:
>> On Nov 17, 2011, at 11:05 AM, "Brian E Carpenter" 
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> I don't see how we could define a helpful API until the generic problem
>>> of scope is solved (see my previous message). We have no general way
>>> for an application to know or describe the scope that applies to itself and
>>> the peer(s) it wants to talk to.
>> 
>> It seems to me that applications "knowing" what scope they want to talk to 
>> is a very isolated special case.   E.g., perhaps your set-top box knows that 
>> it needs to go through your cable ISP's provisioning domain to get streaming 
>> video.   But generally speaking, your application wants to connect through 
>> whatever provisioning domain works best, which is something no provisioning 
>> domain can claim to know; it is something only the host can determine.
> 
> Ultimately, only the hosts involved in a particular transaction can discover
> what works best for them, which is why SCTP, MPTCP and SHIM6/REAP were
> invented, as well as happy-eyeballs.

Well, ultimately, only the applications involved in a particular transaction 
can discover these things, because what's good for one application isn't 
necessarily good for another.  Which is why trying to make e.g. happy eyeballs 
into a general-purpose mechanism is probably a poor idea.

> However these (and any other) host mechanisms need an initial set of address
> pairs to try out and, in many cases, an order of preference in which to
> try them. In some cases (but not all) DNS may be source of a set of
> destination addresses, but it's only the routing system that can provide
> a priori information about which address *pairs* are worth trying.

That is certainly how it should be.  Anything based on heuristics, in the 
absence of routing information provided by the routing system, is just a hack.

Keith



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