Re: On BGP and VPLS

Alex,

> > This point seems to be predicated in the statement that "BGP uses the
> > NLRI field to carry IP reachability"...
> 
> Yes, plus that "BGP is an IP routing protocol."
> 
> > It opens up a sort of philosophical discussion on BGP. This is of
> > course a highly subjective topic which is hard to quantify or to prove
> > by logical terms.
> 
> > Allow me to present my personal view.
> >
> > BGP is a particular implementation of an algorithm that performs non
> > looping database flooding distribution. That algorithm consists mostly
> > on the path vector (used both in ebgp and route reflection) plus route
> > advertisement rules. This is the publicly specified part of the beast.
> 
> This is where we disagree in the first place.
> 
> There's a fine line between a database distribution flooding algorithm
> and a path-vector routing algorithm. BGP is clearly not the former.

Your argument that "BGP is clearly not the former" seems to be in
the same category as the argument that "RSVP doesn't do routing".
As you may recall the latter was used by some folks few years ago
as the reason not to extend RSVP to support explicitly routed LSP.
Reality (market) proved this argument to be irrelevant from the
practical point of view.
 
Yakov.