Dear Kaupo, others, (Speaking as individual working group contributor.) On Mon, Jul 10, 2023 at 10:06:30AM +0300, Kaupo Ehtnurm via db-wg wrote:
Since route6 object is a must and ROA is a should and they ultimately fill the same purpose, than why isn't there a "max length" in route6 object?
That's a good question! The specification of IRR 'route6:' objects pre-dates the specification of RPKI ROAs by a number of years. One explanation might be that the designers of RPSL-NG simply didn't think of it. Another aspect is that RPKI ROAs are used as an input into the RFC 6811 Origin Validation procedure (which yields invalid/valid/not-found as outcomes), but no such algorithm existed when RPSL-NG route/route6 objects were defined. I can see how RPKI ROAs and RPSL-NG route/route6 objects look kind of similar from a high level, but the devil is in the details: they do fulfill slightly different purposes. It's important to note that in recent years new insights arose how to make the best use of RPKI ROAs: last year's BCP 185 / RFC 9319 recommends to avoid using the maxLength attribute in RPKI ROAs. Porting 'maxLength' functionality to RPSL-NG route/route6 objects would represent a significant community effort: people would need to write an Internet-Draft to specify what the field really means, and lots of software toolchains would need updating. Given that maxLength in RPKI ROAs was not universially perceived as a good idea, I'm not very optimistic that porting such functionality to the 'legacy' IRR system is worth the effort. Kind regards, Job