[rbridge] WGLC comments on problem and applicability statement

[Donald Eastlake]

Hi,


Below is my summary of the Working Group Last Call comments on
draft-ietf-trill-prob-04.txt.


General:

There appears to be a rough consensus that the draft is excessively critical
of spanning tree and this should be corrected in several places.


Abstract:

There were a number of complaints about the abstract; however the abstract
is reasonably consistent with the body. Rather than considering such
complaints twice, any problems with the body should be fixed and then the
abstract adjusted to be consistent with the revised body.


Introduction:

Comments in the draft concerning spanning tree slow convergence need, at a
minimum, to be qualified to indicate they generally do not apply to RSTP.


Section 2:

There were complaints when 802.1Q was referenced, saying that previous
amendment that were incorporated such as 802.1s should be referenced
instead. And there were complaints when amendments such as 802.1s were
referenced in other parts of the document saying that they no longer exist
and no amendments that have been rolled into the 802.1Q base document should
be mentioned separately.

In the normal case, when not otherwise qualified, "802.1Q" should refer to
the current IEEE 802.1Q standard at the time this draft is published and as
specified in the References section; however, there is no particular harm in
referring to earlier amendments that have been rolled into 802.1Q as long as
their status is mentioned.


Section 2.1:

There was one comment that thicknet, thinnet, and hubs should not be
mentioned because they no longer exist but the reference to them is
historical and there are still hubs, at least, in use.


Section 2.2:

There is a statement in the draft intended to compare ECMP link-state with
non-ECMP link state which may appear to be a comparison between ECMP
link-state with STP. This should be clarified.


Section 2.3:

The referenced paper (reference [5] in the draft) contains serious errors
and should probably not be referenced. But, as Francois Tallet said, "RSTP
can indeed suffer from the usual count to infinity issue specific to
distance vector protocols that can delay the convergence by few seconds."


Section 2.5:

That there are actually 65 trees available with MSTP and that each is used
for forwarding a non-overlapping set of VLANs should be clarified.


Section 3.3:

There was one comment that there are no transient loops in Spanning Tree.
This is incorrect. Transient loops, however unlikely, are possible with
Spanning Tree.


Section 3.4:

One missing reference.


Thanks,

Donald (co-chair)

=============================

Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1-508-634-2066 (home)

155 Beaver Street

Milford, MA 01757 USA

d3e3e3 at gmail.com
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