Capwap Mailing List: Re: Proposed Resolution for Issue 224/89 (and part of 146)

[Margaret Wasserman (margaret]

Hi Jim,

On Jan 31, 2007, at 5:45 PM, Jim Murphy wrote:
> The rejection of this proposal for reasons of expediency makes
> little sense in light of recent history for the following reasons:
>
> Firstly, I was asked by the working group chair to bring this proposal
> to this list at last week's interim meeting. The implication of the
> request was that indeed the proposal has merit and is worth the groups
> time to consider it.

Just to clarify...  I was the WG chair who asked you to bring this  
proposal to the list.  I did that for two reasons:

(1) We had agreed not to consider new problems or proposals at the  
interim meeting that hadn't been discussed on the mailing list.  Only  
a small part of the WG was able to attend the interim meeting, and we  
did not want the attendees of the interim meeting to come to  
consensus on changes that would come as a complete surprise to the  
rest of the WG.

(2) There seemed to be some support for the proposal in the interim  
meeting, so it seemed likely that there would be some support for it  
on the list.

So far, I don't think that we have clear consensus for or against  
adopting this proposal, so we should keep discussing it to see if we  
can reach consensus on whether to adopt this proposal now or add it  
to the wish list.

> Secondly, the expediency argument is a false economy.
> The working group members, both the supporters and the detractors have
> already invested their time considering the proposal through a
> productive dialog on this email list. As a result of this dialog,
> the proposal has been enhanced to address all the technical objections
> and a technically superior specification is now at hand. It seems
> shameful that after all technical issues have been addressed we now  
> want
> to waste those efforts for the sake of expediency when in fact the
> work to include the proposal is comparatively small.

<chair hat=off>

I (personally) agree with you that we should not reject this proposal  
for purposes of expediency.  Some technical arguments have been  
raised both for and against, and our analysis should focus on those  
issues.

I am also personally concerned about making changes that will impact  
existing implementations (such as Dave Perkin's proposed header  
changes or this proposal) in this version of CAPWAP, unless there is  
a significant benefit to justify those changes.  I don't personally  
think, in either case, that eliminating up to 4 bytes in some packets  
is a large enough benefit to warrant a non-backwards compatible  
change to the CAPWAP header at this point.  Although, if we do decide  
to make one of these changes, I think we should strongly consider  
making the other change at the same time.

Others may think differently, of course.

</chair>

> Finally, the expediency argument is further weekend by the fact that
> the proposed text is included in this email. I've included it as both
> clear text and a context diff.

You have done an excellent job of stating this proposal very clearly,  
and if we do decide to adopt it that will make it very quick and easy  
to do so.  Thank you.

Margaret