On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 2:34 AM, Theo de Raadt <dera...@cvs.openbsd.org> wrote: > in that regard i disagree, but perhaps only in tone. > > With ipv6, they decided to create a bunch of new problems that > people now find they care deeply about > > - they created a totally new problem by avoiding arp. the > benefit of their layer-2 discovery mechanism has been > absolutely zero; the best unit of measure for the cost of > that decision is "decades". > > - they created a new problem by punting global routing to > "further study" (in this, they showed that they had deep > familiarity with appletalk and ipx). > > - they created an entirely new and huge problem (destroying > SIOCGIFCONF backwards compat hurt IPV6 deployment in operating > systems on a massive scale) by not making their sockaddr be > a power of 2 in size. it sounds silly, but it turns out it > is the kind of thing which matters. when they were told of > this problem (very early on) they said something like "oh, > but we already have 3 engineers in the world running their > own ipv6 test code, so it is too late to change that". > this is the specific mindset which results in layers of bad > decisions papered over top of each other. > > shit which comes out of research organizations all tends to suck these > days, doesn't it. or perhaps it always did (OSI networking, ipv6, > same same). > > i have theorized in the past that the problem we face is > that an insufficient number of axe murderers are attending those kinds > of research meetings.
Thank you for this enlightened response, I actually enjoyed that :) Steph
