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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 26/10/2017 02:13, Noel Chiappa wrote:
...
> Needless to say, had I still been on the IESG
> at the time of the IPv6 process, that design would _never_ have been accepted
> - 'over my dead body'.

Counterfactuals are always fun. However, I believe that the sad fact is that
*no* IPng solution of any kind whatever could in practice have been deployed
smoothly. Why? Because of Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen and a few other 
people. By the time any IPng code could have been available (the first
commercial release of IPv6 code was in 1996), the growth rate of IPv4 and
the inevitability of NAT44 made deployment very hard indeed; the incentives
were all for deploying more and more IPv4, and remained that way for 15+
years.

Now that IPv4 is truly hitting its limits, the main operational complaint
against IPv6 is that it's too different from IPv4. But the incentives are
finally shifting in IPv6's favour, like it or not.

The reason that there is still thrashing in IPv6 transition discussions
is that the original IPv6 transition plan was designed for a different world.
I suspect that the root cause of the IPv6 issues that John Levine mentioned
lies there.

    Brian