Subject: RE: Textual Address Change for Scope-IDs

From: Brian Zill <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 23:25:28 -0800

Sorry Jim, but it still looks to me that you're contradicting yourself.

You tell me:

> I don't want to see our std text representation
> of addresses contain scope-ids.

You tell Shin:

> no I was not referring to the draft.  I was
> referring to conversations I heard and some mail
> during the discussion of the draft.
>
> I agree with you sent me too.

These two statements are contradictory.  The draft is about what the
standard form of text representation should be for scoped addresses.  It
assumes as a basic principle that there should be one.

So if you agree with what Shin sent, does that mean you agree with his
statement "We should employ one unique notation to express scoped addresses
in [long list of examples]"

If so, then I don't understand what it is that you heard or saw discussed
that you don't agree with (regarding textual representation).

On the other hand, if you're saying that we shouldn't have a standard
notation for expressing scoped addresses, than I disagree with you.  I agree
with the draft that there should be one, my only nit is that I believe the
scope id should come first, not last.  This is for two reasons (1) to avoid
colliding with the common way of writing prefix lengths
(address/prefix-length) and (2) IPv6 addresses are big-endian, so it is more
consistent for the scope id to come first.

So for scoped addresses, I think it should be "<sin6_scope_id> <delimiter>
<sin6_addr>".  For global addresses, you'd only have the "<sin6_addr>" part.

> I don't want to see inet_ntop or inet_pton changed at this point in
> time. They are deployed and in BIND production nodes today.

Well, this is back to the API issue again, and I thought we were trying to
stick to one issue per subject line.  I believe that there are solutions to
the API problem that don't involve changing inet_ntop or inet_pton.  But
I'll leave that for the API discussion.

--Brian
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From: Jim Bound <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 10:38:22 -0500

brian,

Ok thanks for keeping on this.  I guess I don't agree with Shin and now
see the source of my confusion and what I disagree with.

I think any input to anything with scope-id should be put in sin6_scope
ID field first.  I think now we all agree with that it should not be
part of the IPv6 address.   For some reason I thought some were
proposing this.

But if I want to use infconfig for scoped addresses as an example to
discuss this beast.  It should be keyed in as follows:

  ifconfig fe80::1 FUZZY le0

NOT 

  ifconfig fe80::1|FUZZY le0

I also don't believe any strings passing around ipv6+scope-ids should
exist like the above.  

I think scope-ids should be kept distinct and separate.

So I do not support Shin's draft then and think it is not necessary.  I
thought they wanted be able to identify the next field with a delimiter
separately like:

  ifconfig fe80::1 | FUZZY le0

Where "|" tells an application parsing the above that following this is
the scope-id. Which I would agree to.

/jim