Subject: Re: I-D ACTION:draft-main-ipaddr-text-rep-01.txt

From: JINMEI Tatuya / 神明達哉 <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 08:50:05 +0900

>>>>> On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 17:33:40 +0100, 
>>>>> Zefram <[email-masked]> said:

>> Title		: Textual Representation of IPv4 and IPv6 Addresses
>> Author(s)	: A. Main
>> Filename	: draft-main-ipaddr-text-rep-01.txt
>> Pages		: 12
>> Date		: 2003-10-23
> ...
>> A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
>> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-main-ipaddr-text-rep-01.txt

> I've not been able to work on this for most of the last six months due
> to personal problems, but I've finally got round to handling the comments
> from the first draft and I'm in full working order again.

> It was pointed out that this ought to be standards-track, and I've
> labelled this draft accordingly.  Does this need to be adopted as a WG
> draft in order to be published on the standards track?  I'm not clear
> on the procedure here.  If there's any non-trivial decision to be made
> about the relation between the WG and this draft then it could probably
> be decided quickly in Minneapolis.  (I won't be in Minneapolis, btw --
> I'm not going to the US under the present regime.)

I support this draft, and I personally think it should be published as
a standard truck document.

A couple of points that are related to this draft:

1. I'm particularly interested in if this document updates Section 2.2
   of draft-ietf-ipv6-addr-arch-v4-00.txt.  As discussed in this list
   before (see the thread found at
   http://www.atm.tut.fi/list-archive/ipng/msg09279.html), we cannot
   really be sure from the addr-arch document if the following
   representation is a valid IPv6 address:

   1234:1234:1234:1234:01234::
   (Note that it contains 5 digits as a 16-bit value)

   The ambiguity of the interpretation actually introduces ambiguity
   of an inet_pton() implementation.

   On the other hand, draft-main-ipaddr-text-rep makes it clear that
   such a notation is invalid.  I agree on this interpretation, though
   this may be controversial as you can see in the thread above.

2. draft-ietf-ipv6-scoping-arch-00.txt defines an extension of the
   textual representation for IPv6 scoped addresses in order to
   disambiguate the scope zone.  I'm not sure if
   draft-main-ipaddr-text-rep should be modified to support the
   extension (my current impression is that it's too much), but we
   probably need to clarify relationship between these two documents.
   (As a co-editor of scoping-arch, I'll do this for the scoping-arch
   document if necessary)

					JINMEI, Tatuya
					Communication Platform Lab.
					Corporate R&D Center, Toshiba Corp.
					[email-masked]

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From: Zefram <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 10:07:19 +0000

JINMEI Tatuya / ?$B?@L@C#:H wrote:
>   of draft-ietf-ipv6-addr-arch-v4-00.txt.

It's meant to supersede what's currently there, one way or another.
Ultimately, ipv6-addr-arch really ought to have a normative reference to
ipaddr-text-rep, but is there an issue with them being at different stages
of the standards track?  Perhaps we can't do that on this iteration.

In which order are ipv6-addr-arch-v4 and ipaddr-text-rep likely to be
published as RFCs?  If ipv6-addr-arch-v4 comes first, then ipaddr-text-rep
should be noted as updating it.  If the other way round, ipv6-addr-arch
should either explicitly reference ipaddr-text-rep or copy the new,
precise, text from ipaddr-text-rep section 3.2.  (The ABNF could
also be copied across, but it's not essential, and I'd like to avoid
a proliferation of duplicates.  The URI syntax document already has
a duplicate of an earlier version of the ABNF, in order to avoid a
publication dependency.)

[more than four digits in a hex piece]
>   this may be controversial as you can see in the thread above.

I don't think it's at all controversial.  Every source that has
explicitly addressed this issue specifies a maximum of four digits (see
ipaddr-text-rep section 2.2).  This issue was raised on this mailing list
last time ipaddr-text-rep was discussed, and there was an overwhelming
consensus for a maximum of four digits.

>   probably need to clarify relationship between these two documents.

The presentation format for unscoped addresses, specified in
ipaddr-text-rep, forms part of the scoped address syntax.  It's not
necessary to put the scoped address syntax in the same document.
There's a similar issue with the address prefix syntax; I considered
including that in ipaddr-text-rep, but I think it's already adequately
specified by section 2.3 of draft-ietf-ipv6-addr-arch-v4-00.

Section 10 of draft-ietf-ipv6-scoping-arch-00 incorporates the IPv6
unscoped address syntax by reference, without specifying which document
is to provide that syntax.  It should probably have an explicit normative
reference to ipaddr-text-rep.

-zefram
-- 
Andrew Main (Zefram) <[email-masked]>