RE: : RFC 4005 AUTH48 Review

> Your historical spelunking is impressive, but I fail to see the
> relevance to your defense.  In fact, that passage quoted has likely
> been there since Diameter & RADIUS shared ports, at which point it
> was probably accurate; the fact that it's still there seems to be
> evidence less of its basic validity than the lack of critical
> thought applied to the problem since.

I would agree that there was a lack of critical thinking about the impact
of evolving Diameter away from sharing the RADIUS port and transport.  In
retrospect, this was a decision that fundamentally weakened the Diameter
backward compatibility story, while providing few compensating benefits.
However, at this point, this is water under the bridge.

The  AAA WG chose to evolve the Diameter protocol as it was submitted in
the solicitation.  The selection procedure did not require that candidate
protocols demonstrate RADIUS compatibility beyond gatewaying.  If it had,
then Diameter would not have been selected -- if you may recall, a
RADIUS++ entry was included that offered roughly the same level of
compatibility as the original Diameter design.

At this point, rather than rehashing Diameter design decisions made before
the AAA WG was formed, it best serves the AAA WG and the IETF to publish
the Diameter protocol specifications as expeditiously as possible.
The AUTH48 process is not the time to redesign a protocol -- it is
the time to review a document for publication.