Dear Per,
When is too late now? The original transition plans had to be revised
at IETF around 2008 largely because it was only "just before it's too
late". So there has been a reprieve of a hard withdrawl for an extra 12
years. But can you say now when would you know if you left it just
before too late again? Or when it is actually too late!?
There are plenty of folk who have been engaging in IPv6 issues
collectively in Fora, TaskForces, Readiness activities. ISOC has its 360
Deploy team. All take a strong interest in unpicking the detail and
distribute clue as to the detail of how to do things better. UKNOF has
also been a pioneering place that has always been open to engaging on IPv6.
Personally I don't think we can or should talk about The Internet going
IPv6 native as if there is some kind of future NCP/TCP cut off repeat.
We need to live with and build on what we have.
best
Christian
NB Ito Jun is unable of course to defend himself and WIDE Kame now. I
would just say that he provided every opportunity for you to build on
that code and rather than sniping at it twenty five years on. It would
be great to see acknowledgement of the enormous contribution that was
made openly to the benefit of the Internet communities from that team
and build from it.
On 25/05/2020 10:17, Per Bilse wrote:
When I saw this thread starting I thought to myself "No, no, no ...
this will never end well." I decided to stay out of it, but Neil
raised an important point, namely that things are more complicated
than what meets the eye. The state of IPv6 software in the field
isn't good, and much of it dates back to the early years of this
century, or even late last century. There was great enthusiasm and a
flurry of activity when IPv6 first saw the light of day, but the
endurance of IPv4 combined with a steady stream of routine, everyday
issues meant that IPv6 started taking a back seat after just a few
years. I keep telling this story about a journalist asking me "When
will the Internet change to IPv6?", to which I replied "Just before
it's too late"; it wasn't what he was expecting to hear, but it was a
reflection of daily reality in a commercial environment, and that
hasn't changed. IPv6 remained a draft standard, accompanied by
various additional RFCs and related documents, until it was finally
consolidated in RFC8200 a few years ago; the process took nearly 20
years, and the promotion to full standard was partly prompted by an
administrative change in the RFC process.
Being stuck in the draft standard state isn't in itself unusual, and
interoperability demands from the real world usually iron out any
implementation bumps, but in this respect IPv6 has been in a
backwater. Probably the most widely known and used IPv6 code base
came out of the WIDE/KAME project, but much of it is literally 15-20+
years old, and hasn't been updated for over a decade. Hence, by today
there are dozens, or probably actually hundreds, of slightly diverging
IPv6 implementations in various states of disrepair. They trace their
origins back to RFC2460 from 1998, but each will have incorporated its
own blend of tweaks, fixes, and updates, some from RFCs and errata,
some from I-Ds, and some from in-house developments. Few, if any, are
ready for prime time in the way IPv4 is, and while they all generally
work, IPv6 simply doesn't have the tightly knit development and
interoperability history that IPv4 has.
So ... when will the Internet go IPv6 native? Maybe never. It's a
commercial issue, and there are no overarching considerations at play:
IPv4 doesn't cause global warming, and the ozone layer is safe too.
Hence, nobody is likely to spend time and energy on IPv6 until doing
so becomes a source of revenue, and that will in the first instance
mean the whole world catching up with two decades of neglect.
-- Per
