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

[Merike Kaeo]

The important part is to get more people deploying v6 along with  
their current infrastructures and yes, possibly at some point some of  
the v4 will eventually go away.  But my gut feeling is that this may  
be a different 'transition' than that from IPX, DECnet, etc.  The  
'IPv4 will become non-essential' depends a lot on what applications  
will evolve to in terms of what transports they use.

I am always mildly amused when I see appletalk is still configurable  
on my MAC although not on by default.  And luckily it's a non- 
essential protocol :)

- merike

On Mar 30, 2009, at 9:37 AM, 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.
>