[rrg] [Fwd: I-D Action:draft-carpenter-renum-needs-work-00.txt]

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 2008-10-29 11:34, Olivier Bonaventure wrote:
> Brian,
>>> I'm convinced that with some small changes we could significantly
>>> improve the "renumberability" of services and applications.
>> I wish I could be as optimistic. Unfortunately I believe we have
>> 25 years of history to deal with (i.e. since the Berkeley socket
>> interface hit the streets) in which IP addresses have been treated
>> as de facto constants in services and applications.
> 
> With more recent APIs such as those described by Stuart Cheshire,
> applications don't even see the IP addresses. Using applications built
> on such APIs could be one way to improve their renumberability
> 
>  <http://www.stuartcheshire.org/quicktime/StuartCheshireIETF72.html>

Certainly a name-based API confines the problem to the API and the
stack, but (as IPv6 has taught us) there are billions of dollars
invested in code that uses the address-based API, and the inertia
in that software is enormous.

   Brian