Re: [address-policy-wg] 2008-09 New Policy Proposal (ASPLAIN Format for the Registration of 4-byte ASNs)

[David Kessens <david.kessens@localhost]

Shane,

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 09:30:10PM +0200, Shane Kerr wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 17:41 +0200, Marco Hogewoning wrote:
> > 
> > >> Let's keep things simple please!
> > >
> > > Indeed, but I guess you would not recommend to "simply" change a
> > > formally adopted policy document, would you? This could be seen as
> > > a nasty precedent...
> > 
> > 
> > You have a point there and it we might call it an oversight in the PDP  
> > to not be able to handle small changes in formatting or typos without  
> > going through the whole process again. So for the sake of it all,  
> > let's adopt this change using the current proces and focus the  
> > discussion on how to handle such changes in the future. I don't expect  
> > it to happen much, but the way you put it a small cosmetic error can  
> > result in going over a lenghty discussion again and might be a tool to  
> > bend things differently by the need to reach consensus again.
> 
> I agree.
> 
> Right now there *is* no other way to change policies, right? I found
> Thomas' comment a bit strange - like asking the IETF to create a
> standard without an Internet draft.
> 
> But he does have a point that the PDP may be heavyweight in cases like
> this. So you are right, lets tweak the PDP. :)

I don't think Thomas comments were strange at all. It is complete
overkill to use the policy process to deal with *conventions* on how
to write down a particular resource.

However, it was explained quite well why we encountered this problem and
it seems reasonable to use a policy proposal to get around it.

However, the new proposal again creates a dependancy on a particular
format instead of leaving the format out of the policy.

If the proposal would read like (new text):

 1.9 4-byte AS Numbers
 . . .

 Terminology
 
 "2-byte only AS Numbers" refers to AS Numbers in the range 0 - 65535
 
 "4-byte only AS Numbers" refers to AS Numbers in the range 65536 - 4294967295

 "4-byte AS Numbers" refers to AS Numbers in the range 0 - 4294967295

we would not refer to any particular format and we can just proceed
whether the IETF is ready to approve ASPLAIN format or not.

Also, I noticed that it is kind of strange that the policy document
has no reference whatsoever to the IETF document that actually defines
4-octet AS numbers.

Note that IETF uses 'octet' in their terminology, while the policy
document uses the word 'byte'. Personally, I don't particularly care
but it might be more consistant to use the same terminology.

David Kessens
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