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Last Call Review of draft-mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan-08
review-mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan-08-genart-lc-sparks-2014-04-07-00

Request Review of draft-mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan
Requested revision No specific revision (document currently at 09)
Type Last Call Review
Team General Area Review Team (Gen-ART) (genart)
Deadline 2014-03-24
Requested 2014-02-06
Authors Mallik Mahalingam , Dinesh Dutt , Kenneth Duda , Puneet Agarwal , Larry Kreeger , T. Sridhar , Mike Bursell , Chris Wright
I-D last updated 2014-04-07
Completed reviews Genart Last Call review of -08 by Robert Sparks (diff)
Opsdir Last Call review of -09 by Ron Bonica
Assignment Reviewer Robert Sparks
State Completed
Request Last Call review on draft-mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan by General Area Review Team (Gen-ART) Assigned
Reviewed revision 08 (document currently at 09)
Result Not ready
Completed 2014-04-07
review-mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan-08-genart-lc-sparks-2014-04-07-00
I am the assigned Gen-ART reviewer for this draft. For background on
Gen-ART, please see the FAQ at

<http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/area/gen/trac/wiki/GenArtfaq>.

Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call comments
you may receive.

Document: draft-malingham-dutt-dcops-vxlan-08
Reviewer: Robert Sparks
Review Date: 20 Mar 2014
IETF LC End Date: 24 Mar 2014
IESG Telechat date: not yet scheduled for a telechat

Summary: This document is not ready for publication as an Experimental
IETF Stream RFC

(Apologies to the everyone on the long list of authors - this review is
primarily about process, but I do have some comments for you below.)

To the AD and shepherd: Why is the proposed status Experimental and not
Informational?
The text in the shepherd writeup provides a strong motivation for
Informational, but not Experimental.

I understand the concern that led to the inclusion of the last sentence
of the abstract and the first part of the introduction
(" The IETF consensus on this RFC represents consensus to publish this
memo,  and not consensus on the text itself."), but
this sentence does not address that concern.

If you are wanting to document what exists so that other documents can
talk meaningfully about it (as the writeup suggests),
please use Informational, and replace the sentence with an adaptation
of  the bulk of the answer to question 1 in the writeup.

If you are wanting more people to implement exactly what this document
describes and learn something from those implementations,
describe in the document what you're trying to learn and get IETF
consensus that the experiment is a good one to pursue.

The combination of Experimental and "there is no consensus on the text
in this document" is not a good one.

It might be easier to find the right way to bring the important parts
forward if you split the format definition and the sketch of protocol
behavior into a separate document from the motivation text at the
beginning and the deployment scenario discussions at the end.

To the authors:

This _is_ good information, and clearly has already been useful in IETF
protocol development discussions.
The number of documents referencing this one is a strong indicator of that:
<http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mahalingam-dutt-dcops-vxlan/referencedby/>

The document reads clearly, and complete enough to inform a basic
implementation.
(Though I encourage you to be more explicit about what to do if you
receive a packet with the I flag set to 0).

Please reread each sentence that begins with "Another" and consider
either restructuring the sections where you have a string of them so
that they are not necessary, and simply removing the clause when you use
it in isolation.

6.1 is out of place - please move it to be with the other places where
you put requirements on an implementation. I suggest it belongs at the
end of section 4 or as its own section between section5 and section 6.