> From: Ross Callon <[email protected]>
> Suppose hypothetically that we do all agree that it is desirable to
> separate location and identity, and that it is feasible to do so. It
> seems highly likely that we don't agree on the feasibility of any one
> specific scheme .. Thus what does it mean if we say that each person
> who has participated in the RRG discussions separately feels that
> there is *some* feasible way to do so?
Well, it does establish two things.
First (and most importantly from my point of view), it does put into the
formal record the desirability of separating location and identity. This is a
concept that did not fly in the IETF some decades ago (much to the chagrin of
me and others), and so I would view a formal endorsement of the desirability
(nay, necessity) of doing so as a significant milestone in making progress.
Second, the second clause ("also technically feasible to do so") indicates
that the considered engineering opinion of the group is that it is, well,
technically feasible - something else which has been questioned in the past.
> Thus to me the statement:
>> 'The RRG did reach a rough consensus that it is both desirable to
>> separate location and identity, and also technically feasible to do
>> so.'
> seems to be somewhere on the boundary between meaningless and
> misleading. Perhaps a better sentence might be:
>> 'The RRG did reach a rough consensus that it would be desirable to
>> separate location and identity, should we agree on a way to do so.'
The problem with that, from my perspective, is that you're putting the
engineering cart (the details of how to do it) before the architecture horse
(the high-level goal of separating location and identity). To put it another
way, you're holding progress on the architectural front hostage to agreement
on the engineering front.
As I previously discussed with Wes George, I think that people can
_reasonably_ disagree about the optimal engineering path (based on things
like how necessary one thinks it is to provide benfits to early adopters),
which means disagreement on choice of a particular engineering path is
somewhat inevitable.
However, having agreement on an architectual goal does increase, I think, the
urgency of exploring the various engineering paths that lead to that overall
agreed-upen goal. For that, and other reasons, I think there is value to
recording agreement on an overall _goal_, even if we have yet to reach agreement
on the _means_ to get there.
Noel
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