Re: Single vs many solution(s)

Yakov,

>> If we come here believing that the IETF is nothing but a market
>> battlefield, then we can call any situation where more than one
>> existing implementation is available a "business issue", and agree
>> that trying to resolve it would cost too much blood, so "the market"
>> should pick the one that they like more.
>> 
>> If instead we believe that the IETF is an engineering organization,
>> where we come to work together on something we can later use to
>> interoperate in SP networks (even though we may have our own existing
>> implementations), I think we should be ready to sit down, talk to each
>> other and try to build consensus on what should that IETF Standard be.
>> 
>> Which mindset do we choose?

> The one that reflects reality, and not the one that reflects wishful
> thinking.

My approach (which you may call "wishful thinking") is the second one
above--to treat IETF as an engineering organization and expect people
(vendors, users, researchers) to talk and work together on IETF
standards. I don't know what your "reality"-based one is.

> With this in mind the following from Ross' e-mail answers
> your question.

Not really.

A key notion in Ross'es explanation is a "major approach". If we apply
the "major approach" argument to every situation where more than one
direction is possible, we will end up with exploration of the solution
space.

Therefore, it is important to distinguish between a "major approach"
and a "mechanism performing a specific function within a major
approach". Within the VPN context, it seems reasonable to say that L3
VPNs and L2 VPNs are fundamentally different major approaches. Within
L2 VPNs, it also seems reasonable to say that VPLS and VPWS are two
different major approaches as they are used to provide different
services. On the other hand, can we call LDP-based and BGP-based VPLS
signalling "major approaches", or are they rather two possible
variants for a quite narrow-scoped signalling function?

Alex