Technical Summary
This document requests IANA to mark BGP path attribute values 30, 31,
129, 241, 242, and 243 as "deprecated". These values were found to be
in use in the Internet, despite not having been allocated by IANA.
Working Group Summary
This document arises because as part of the development of the large
communities specification, values 30 and 31 were discovered to be "squatted"
on by fielded implementations. Subsequently, two other implementations were
found to be "squatting" on the other values. There was some debate in the working
group as to whether it was better to deprecate the code points or to somehow "punish"
the offending implementers. One of the arguments in favor of deprecation was that
pragmatically speaking, no implementer would reasonably want to use one of the
tainted code points and if forced to do so, no operator would be excited to deploy the
resulting feature. The deprecation process was identified as the appropriate one to allow
IANA to flag them as unfit for use. There was good working group consensus for this
position.
Document Quality
This is a trivial process document. It has received good WG attention including review
by people associated with all parties "squatting" on the affected path attribute values.
Personnel
Document Shepherd: John Scudder
Responsible Area Director: Alvaro Retana