---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Date: 31. juli 2003 16:44 -0700 From: Tony Hain To: iesg@ietf.org Cc: ipng@sunroof.eng.sun.com Subject: FW: AD response to Site-Local Appeal IESG, Unfortunately it is necessary to bring this appeal to the IESG as the chairs & chartering AD's have not taken the ample opportunity to recognize the seriousness of the problem of allowing a chair to ask an ambiguous question, then decide what it means after the fact. As the video of the SF meeting ftp://limestone.uoregon.edu/pub/videolab/video/ietf56/ietf56 - 03202003 - INT ipv6.mpg (989MB) clearly shows, the overriding goal was declaring consensus, not on actually recognizing or achieving it. From comments on the mail list, the chair appears to have had a personal mission of getting SL removed from the scoped architecture document and progressing it without discussion of the one scope most widely deployed in the IPv4 network. This oversight will result in a serious degradation of the quality of the WG output. There was and still is no consensus in the WG about what 'deprecate site-local' means, just a declaration by the chair that consensus occurred. During the SF meeting multiple current & former IESG & IAB members felt the need to get clarity about the question being asked, and there was an explicit unanswered request by Dave Thaler asking for an indication what action implementations should take if elimination was selected. The best the chair offered was the response at 2:13:19 "I'll resay what I said earlier which is I had said we would say eliminate it or keep it and then we'd have multiple choices if we kept it but apparently if we eliminate it we will also have multiple choices about what exactly that means". In other words, the chair acknowledged the ambiguity of the question, but persisted in calling it despite the lack of anyone in the room to make an informed decision about the outcome of their choice. The question asked to the list was no clearer. The declaration of consensus must be overturned as an abuse of the process. This should be done soon as the whole event has created a state of confusion where network managers are questioning how they are supposed to deploy IPv6 without locally controlled address space. The subsequent discussion on the mail list identified multiple work items, which the WG should or is already undertaking, and those can be accomplished without the chairs calling further questions on the topic. In particular, a document identifying the requirements for local use address space is underway. Until the WG agrees on the requirements, there is no possibility for the group to evaluate the utility of the current SL or other approaches. Tony Hain