Subject: Additional extended communities clarification

From: Jeffrey Haas <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 12:16:03 -0400

In section 5, "New BGP Extended Community Types" (new? they didn't exist 
before), we get 0x00 - 0x03.  Were these really intended to be restricted
to transitive?  If not, perhaps labeling them as 0x00 and 0x40, etc.
may be more appropriate.

-- 
Jeff Haas 
NextHop Technologies

---

From: Dan Tappan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 14:47:24 -0400

>to transitive?  If not, perhaps labeling them as 0x00 and 0x40, etc.

I believe that the intent of the transitive bit was that it should be an 
orthogonal property of the community. So, any defined community "type" 
value would have a transitive and a non-transitive variant.

Unfortunately that's made the term "type" ambiguous as to whether it refers 
to the assigned value (with the transitive bit masked off) or the value in 
a packet. The intent of that paragraph was the former.
I think what happened was that all that text equating "type" to octets was 
written before the transitive bit was assigned.

We could either explicitly list transitive and non-transitive versions of 
each value, not only in section 5 but also in all the following sections, 
or we can come up with a different terms for the first 1 or 2 octets vs the 
assigned value. Maybe "Type field" vs "type-code"?