[ih] fragmentation (Re: Could it have been different? [was Re: vm vs. memory])

[Paul Vixie]

Dave Crocker wrote:
> ...
>
> The original mandate was for more address space. All the other
> 'features' that were attempted went beyond that mandate.
>
> ...

that word, "mandate," i don't think it means what you think it means.

we were volunteers, who worked on what we found deserving of our time. 
or we were employees, who worked on what our bosses said to work on. at 
no time did we or our families or our employers sign a suicide pact 
agreeing to spend the next 16 years of our lives working on a system 
whose utility could only be judged in the future, but which looked 
pretty awful in the moment.

if the fragmentation differences between v4 and v6 were as you say a 
form of scope creep, then i call foul, not on those engineers, but on 
the paper pushing bureaucrats who killed TCPv6, which would have given 
us renumberable connection endpoints. that is, if one was allowed, the 
other should also have been.

i was pushing for a simple expansion of the IP header so that we could 
use source routing on all flows, to connect network 10 at each end, 
through a series of tubes, really, that had unique IP addresses, so that 
the path would become the identity. the dns portion of this design 
looked a lot like what was later called 8+8. i was shouted down, as was 
mike o'dell, so i harken to your suspicion that anything simple would've 
been rejected.

-- 
P Vixie