Site-local debate (Re: objectivity vs. leadership)

[Margaret Wasserman]

At 10:38 PM 4/25/2003 +0200, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>Other than Steve Deering, I have not seen any recent IESG or IAB member 
>speak out in favour of site-local.

It isn't clear that Steve Deering supported site-local addressing
either, at least not consistently...  Steve was always very good
about supporting the consensus of the IPv6 WG.  However, he did
express doubts about site-local addressing on occasion.

Tim Chown recently re-posted this March 1998 post of Steve's to the
IPv6 list:

"Site-local addresses made more sense in some of the earlier stages of
SIP and SIPP development, based on ideas that no longer apply in IPv6. I
would be quite happy to delete site-local unicast addresses entirely from
IPv6 if we had consensus on that (though the notion of site boundaries would
still appear in the scope field of multicast address) -- it would simplify
the implementations and the specs, and eliminate much of the confusion and
design choices of the sort we have been discussing. However, I don't recall
consensus ever being reached about net 10 in the IPv4 world. Does anyone in
the IPv6 community want to speak up in favor of site-local addesses?

(Note: if we eliminated site-local addresses, we could always add them back
in in the future if absolutely necessary, using the net 10 approach, i.e.,
simply designating one global prefix for private use.)"

We could have saved a lot of current-day pain if we had taken Steve's
advice in 1998.

Margaret