Biggest mistake for IPv6: It's not backwards compatible, developers admit

[Tom Vest]

On Mar 30, 2009, at 12:37 PM, Fred Baker wrote:

> On Mar 30, 2009, at 9:27 AM, Joe Abley wrote:
>
>> What is required is not for people (service architects, content  
>> providers, access providers, users) to turn off IPv4 and turn on  
>> IPv6, but instead to add IPv6 capability *in addition to* IPv4. If  
>> IPv6 has a future in our lifetimes (and I think it does) it is in  
>> an overwhelmingly dual-stack world, not a world of v6-only clients.
>
> I agree with you, with one exceptional point. At some point, IPv6  
> deployment will be widespread enough that most people are running  
> it. If that does not eventually become true, we never had a real  
> problem in the first place - and I will argue that the only reason  
> that IPv6 is at all an issue is that there is a problem. At the  
> point where most folks have deployed IPv6, just as happened with  
> DECNET, IPX, and others, IPv4 will become non-essential.

Hi Fred,

Does this mean that you completely discount the possibility that the  
perpetuation of IPv4 might represent a "local maximum," as someone put  
it in San Francisco -- i.e., an attractive short-term but inferior  
long-term solution, but one that once adopted could be very difficult  
or impossible to escape?

It seems to be that rejecting the very idea of a "local maximum" like  
this would entail a sort of Panglossian view of the world, i.e., that  
the status quo always represents the best of all possible worlds, by  
definition. Since the status quo is rarely homogenous, however, and we  
can almost always imagine better/worse outcomes, I don't think this is  
a internally coherent position... I don't necessarily attribute it to  
you, just trying to understand the comment...

Thanks,

Tom