Hi Remco, Frustration can be a good driver for change, but the question is: how high is everyone's tolerance for breakage, and who gets to put up with the consequences? A couple of years ago, several of us started out in the DB Task Force with chain saws revving and ready for action, but we walked out with a strong sense that evolution was a better approach than revolution. I don't think, incidentally, that there's a problem making smaller changes of the sort that Marco is proposing, and in fact changes like this are much needed and would be much appreciated. The reason I suggested breaking things out into separate updates is that kitchen sink proposals are often a nuisance to handle and non-contentious changes end up being blocked by other changes. This is not a good use of peoples' time or resources. Nick Remco van Mook wrote on 08/09/2026 14:05:
Hi all,
actually I'd argue the opposite (as I already did at AP during RIPE89: https://ripe89.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/83-ripe-89-address-... I think discussions in AP over the last years have shown that our current set of policies is now so hard to have a common understanding about and so hard to actually produce updates for, that I think we'd do very well to go and turn our current policy stack, how the NCC interprets those policies, the NWIs, and an all-over harmonisation of terms into a single consistent policy manual, ARIN style. It would also help us to finally get an actual definition of 'assignment' in the IPv6 context.
If it's not feasible at this point to do a rewrite, waiting longer will certainly not make matters better. The observation that even minor changes have a chance to cause a major ripple in the reading of our current policy set demonstrates the predicament we're in. If seasoned policy experts have trouble getting this right at this point, how can we expect any newcomers to make a contribution?
Kind regards
Remco
On 8 Sep 2026, at 14:40, James Kennedy via address-policy-wg <address-policy-wg@ripe.net> wrote:
As a general comment, my inclination would either be to do a complete top-down rewrite of specific documents, or else approach rewrites with changes only to small areas. Otherwise you end up with the risk of minor changes derailing other, and potentially more important, changes.
I tend to favour the latter. A complete top-down rewrite of RIPE policy documents sounds tempting but I'm not sure how feasible that would be in practice.
Either way, even minor changes must have their impact on existing policies properly identified and taken into account. On mitigating the risk of derailing other ongoing changes, I trust the WG chairs to coordinate that with the proposers :)
Best, James
From: Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org> To: "Marco Schmidt"<mschmidt@ripe.net> Cc: "address-policy-wg@ripe.net"<address-policy-wg@ripe.net> Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:05:53 +0100 Subject: [address-policy-wg] Re: Feedback for potential policy proposal on IPv6
Marco Schmidt wrote on 08/09/2026 06:07:
The main points I raised were the lack of a general reference to the audit procedure in the IPv6 policy, and the wording of the section dealing with policy compliance and non-compliance, which has remained unchanged since 2002 and might be difficult to understand without the historical context.
for sure, the existing section of policy that you quoted is not well written and doesn't look like it reflects how ipv6 address resources are handled. It would benefit from a rewrite.
In terms of other RIPE policy document changes, there's no shortage of material that could be improved: many of the documents are the product of organic growth, and show all the signs of it. As a general comment, my inclination would either be to do a complete top-down rewrite of specific documents, or else approach rewrites with changes only to small areas. Otherwise you end up with the risk of minor changes derailing other, and potentially more important, changes.
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