[ih] IETF relevance (was Memories of Flag Day?)

[Dave Crocker]

On 8/10/2023 3:44 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> What do you mean? There's always been a migration path. It has
> been immensely complicated by the market success of NAT44, but
> we knew from Day 1 that we needed both coexistence and a
> transition plan. In fact, we knew it before IPv6 was picked
> as the design (RFC1671).

Brian,

There was even a working group on transition to IPv6, before there was a 
chosen IPv6.  (Chaired by Bob Hinden and me.)  As nearly as I can tell, 
the work was ignored.

The model for 'transition' that was adopted was "implement a parallel, 
independent stack".  This raised the adoption barrier to be as high as 
possible. Might as well have been an OSI stack.

Note if there had been serious concern for minimizing adoption effort, 
an example alternative that could have been adopted -- especially if 
Steve Deering's original proposal had been adopted -- would have been to 
make IPv4 address space a subset of IPv6 address space.

This would have eliminated any initial administrative effort, with 
gateways could function largely as interoperable routers, and a minimum 
of address syntax adaptation.

That is, IPv6 address administration could have been entirely removed as 
an initial adoption barrier.

But as I say, that's just an example of a difference between taking 
barriers to adoption as a serious concern, versus what actually happened.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social