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Re: IANA assignment policies

At 12:08 AM -0500 2/13/04, Theodore Ts'o wrote: 
There has been no further activity on the mailing list about IANA
assignment policies for IKEv2, and we need to somehow make progress.

So I'm going to make a set of proposals given the discussion which we've
had on the subject:

1) All numberspaces should have at least some (perhaps a very small)
    Private Use, per David Black's concerns about being able to do
    private experiments.

2) All 16-bit and greater number spaces will have a policy of
   Specification Required for the portion of the space which is reserved
   for IANA assignment.

3) All 8-bit number spaces shall have the following policy for the
   portion of the space which is reserved for IANA assignment.  A number
   may be assigned EITHER via a standards-track RFC OR by satisfying
   both of the following policies: Specification Required and Expert
   Review.  Furthermore, the review by the expert must follow a two-week
   public discussion on a mailing list.  As always, the decision of the
   expert may be appealed to the IESG who may decide to affirm or
   override the Expert's decision.

Does this satisfy everyone's concerns?

No. The private use proposal is fine. However, as Michael Richardson said on the list over a week ago, "I think that the consensus of the WG list is that all values should be a consistent "Expert Review"." This is an easy-to-understand policy on IANA assignments. There were people in favor, one concerned, and I believe his concerns were allayed.

Splitting the decision by size of field will not be easy to figure out for implementers, yet they are the main users of the IANA registry. The proposal of having some numbers be "Specification Required" for some spaces but Specification Required or expert review for other spaces means that proposals that include some of both have to deal with different requirements for a single proposal. Worse yet, "Specification Required" forces IANA to decide if a non-RFC document is "permanent and readily available". Knowing that has proven to be something that is well outside of IANA's skill set.

Please go with the earlier WG consensus, which is to make all values "Expert Review" instead of creating a new and more difficult to understand one.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium