I've been watching a long stream of messages about WESP flying by and I
must admit to being rather confused. What follows is based on my best
understanding of what's going on, so please apply grains of salt as
needed.
It's likely that I'm in the same corner as Tero.
It sounds to me like WESP was chartered to do something very specific,
having to do with ESP-NULL and intermediate systems looking at traffic.
And now we have discussions about ESP-nonNULL with WESP, and maybe WESP
as an alternative to ESP, or a replacement to ESP.
How is this possible? It's nice to talk about the benefits of greater
generality and all that, but it isn't proper to have a WG chartered to
do a narrow thing and then end up doing something much bigger.
Why not?
Answer: the purpose of a charter is (a) to tell the WG what it should be
doing, (b) to tell observers whether the work of the WG is something
they need to track -- or do NOT need to track.
If a WG goes well outside its charter, that's not fair to those who
would have participated if the charter had said this, but ended up not
participating because the charter told them they did not need to. From
what I understand from Tero's comments, that situation applies to him,
and I think it applies to me as well.
It may well be a good idea to expand or modify or generalize or replace
ESP, but if such a project is to be done, it should be done by a WG
chartered for that purpose, so that all interested parties are on notice
that this work is about to happen.
Meanwhile, as to the consensus call: if this is out of charter as it
appears to be, then, independent of its technical merit, my vote is NO.
paul koning
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