Subject: [PCN] defining extensions to baseline encoding

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 13:56:47 +0100

At last weeks IETF it was agreed that the basline encoding draft is pretty much ready for WGLC. There was also a lot of discussion about the edge behaviour documents out of which came a suggestion that Tom Taylor should write a draft setting out guidance on writing an edge behaviour document for PCN. This triggered a thought - currently in the baseline encoding draft there is a section about rules any extension encodings have to follow in order to comply with this baseline encoding. I was wondering whether it would be sensible to split this into a separate document so you would hav:
1) a pure standards document defining the baseline encoding
2) a document akin to a BCP (e.g. probably informational but carrying more weight) describing how any extension encoding scheme shoudl be written and giving guidance on all the things that it will have to take into account (such as tunneling constraints, choice of DSCPs, valid and invalid state transitions, etc)
 
The pros and cons are as follows.
 
Pros: we get a cleaner baseline document. We ensure that all extension encodings are proprely defined and compatible with baseline. We get 2 RFCs for the price of 1
Cons: its a bit of extra work. We would need to be very precise in defining what makes an acceptable extension. 

I would be happy to do the split and to write the guidance document. Any thoughts on this?
 
Toby