Re: OSPFv3 Extension Future Direction (this ought to get your attention)

[Dave Katz <dkatz at JUNIPER.NET>]

Guess you sent it to the whole list anyhow.  ;-)

Bumping the version number is the only safe way to make significant 
changes for which backward compatibility may be problematic.  It 
doesn't even have to be a significant syntactic or semantic change to a 
protocol, though it tends to invite a whole bunch of meddling when you 
do so...

On Mar 30, 2005, at 1:03 PM, Michael J Barnes wrote:

> Hey Acee,
>
> I want to pass this thought by you personally before sending it to the 
> whole list, to see what you think.
>
> It seems to me that we should be talking about OSPFv4. Radical? 
> Perhaps, but here's why I think this:
>
> OSPFv3, while it has many improvements over OPSFv2, was still not 
> really designed to be extended. I really agree with you in general 
> about the future direction for OSPF, by including TLVs in certain data 
> structures, etc., are great ideas, but the solutions are nasty hacks. 
> But the point I really want to make is not that we shouldn't be 
> extending v3, it's that IMHO the future direction of OSPF should 
> first, be a version of the protocol that has been designed from the 
> base to be extendable. OSPFv3 is part way there, and I agree with the 
> ideas you presented for the future direction, but I just think it 
> would be better in the long run to have a new version of OSPF for 
> this.
>
> If you're interested, I do have some specific ideas for functionality.
>
> Is that too radical of an idea, or something that would be worth more 
> thought?
>
> Thanks,
> Michael