Subject: Re: Shame vs Engineering, also NEW conformance criteria

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 09:48:31 -0700 (PDT)

Bruce Lilly <blilly@xxxxxxxxx>:

>The Path field is used to limit retransmissions (see BCP 14) to sites
>through which an article has passed.  That requires uniqueness in site
>name. 

Yes, that's right.

> an FQDN guarantees uniqueness.

That's not the only way. That's only one of the four options we have 
provided.

>An IP address literal does not;
>10.11.12.13 corresponds to different hosts at different parts of the
>network,

Ummm, so that's why I said "a valid IP literal", which according to item 2
(I think it is) is NOT a non-routable address such as any of the examples
you gave. They aren't valid according to our draft; please don't throw
them up as examples to disprove something I said regarding a valid IP
literal.

>A UUCP name lacks any sort of guarantee of uniqueness 

And yet, the system functioned for many years using them. Go figure. 

If the option isn't valid to start with, then remove it from the list as 
invalid. If it's on the list as one of the ways of identifying a site, 
then it's valid according to us and I see no reason why some are "MUST" 
and others are not.

>Contact for abuse reporting is a WIBNI (Wouldn't It Be Nice If...), not
>a protocol requirement.  But it's not the purpose of the Path field.

According to Charles's latest text, it is. 

>See above.  Foo.example.com may mean different things in the long term;
>10.11.12.13 can mean different things at the same time.

See above. 10.x.x.x is not a routable IP address and does not fall into 
the category of valid as we have attempted to define it. While Charles 
still has something about "public", he's already made it clear that his 
intent was to exclude the private netblocks (and multicast, if that isn't 
considered a part of the private nets) like 10.*, 192.168.*, etc. He's 
just refused to refer to the addresses as "routable".

---

From: Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 15:46:50 -0400

> >through which an article has passed.  That requires uniqueness in site

And "limit retransmissions" is mentioned in BCP 14 as a harm mitigation
item suitable for imperative keywords such as MUST.
 
> them up as examples to disprove something I said regarding a valid IP

There is also something called DHCP, so while e.g. 216.49.158.220 is fully
routable, it may be assigned to one host at one time and to a very different
host a moment later (the Path field has no timestamp), so there is still no
guarantee of uniqueness.  I'm also concerned about the (lack of) stability
of IPv4 address blocks (RFC 3330 has made some recent changes) and it is
probably too early to gauge IPv6 reserved block stability.

> And yet, the system functioned for many years using them. Go figure. 

Once upon a time, there was a registry for UUCP names, and a UUCP Mapping
Project associated with it.  One goal of that project was to provide
unique names among *registered* UUCP sites; it failed to do so, and the
project is gone.  So while it may have sort-of "functioned" for some time,
there is no longer a registry to provide the necessary uniqueness trait.

[...]
> the category of valid as we have attempted to define it.

Note DHCP.  An IP address can be reassigned in time periods of minutes, hours,
or (unusually) days.  Domain names are typically assigned to a registrant for
increments measured in years.  That's orders of magnitude difference, where
an IP address can easily be reassigned before an article finishes propagating.

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 13:25:12 GMT

>just refused to refer to the addresses as "routable".

Not at all. I had something in about routing tables at one stage, and I
was told (Bruce, I think) that would not do, and was told to go look at
RFC 1918. So I did that and came up with "public".

My text now says:

   2.   An encoding of the public [RFC 1918], permanently routable IP
        address - <IPv4address> or <IPv6address> [RFC 3986] - of that
        news-server. ........

Somebody will tell me that is redundant next :-( .

While I was about it, I changed "working email address" to "deliverable
email address". If you think that too is broken, then you must also agree
that RFC 2142 is broken (which it is, but not for that reason).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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