Introducing draft-denog-v6ops-addresspartnaming

Mon Nov 22 11:47:05 UTC 2010

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 23:15, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:

> In fact, it would look pretty weird to most people if we started writing
> 951-21-42-33 (or I bet they wouldn't expect that was a zip code in
> any case). Similarly, if we start placing the separators in arbitrary
> places in phone numbers, people get confused.

The complete uniformity of telephone numbers seems to be a North
American phenomena, but as a German who is used to wildly different
phone numbers, I would still prefer a common scheme for all of them,
yes.

> I still disagree. While I noted the one pathology with the current
> system, that same pathology is present with floating colons
> and there are others which I also pointed out (difficulty in
> reproducing the "correct" placement of the floating colons in
> automated output, for example.

Even worse, allowing floating colons will mean different groups will
adapt different defaults. Not a desirable goal.

> The syntax for handling this was already present in IPv4 and is easily
> adapted to the problem in IPv6. Simply wrap the IPv6 address in
> square brackets (e.g. [2001:db8:feed::cafe]:80 is the ipv6
> address 2001:db8:feed::cafe on port 80).

Which is admittedly ugly, but I can't think of anything better, either.

> We did forego ::192.168.1.1. However, we still have ::ffff:192.168.1.1
> and for good reason. This is a useful construct for allowing humans
> to see in log files that an IPv6-aware application on a dual-stack
> machine accepted an IPv4 connection on an IPv6 socket.

Agreed. Ugly, but useful & needed.

Richard