Subject: Protocol Action: Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL) to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 07:11:05 -0500

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft "Routing Policy Specification 
  Language (RPSL)" <draft-ietf-rps-rpsl-04.txt, .ps> as a Proposed 
  Standard. This document is the product of the Routing Policy System 
  Working Group. The IESG contact persons are John Curran and Michael 
  O'Dell.                                                                  

Technical Summary
 
 The Routing Policy Specification Language is a notation for recording
 Internet routing policy in a form suitable for analysis and computation.
 It is descended from RIPE-81 and RIPE-181 descriptions but also benefits
 from analysis of the inadequacies of those earlier formats.   There is
 considerable interest by the operational community in moving the
 routing registry efforts to RPSL as the RIPE-181 notation is growing
 increasingly inadequate for many important tasks as routing topologies
 become more complex and policy-driven.

Working Group Summary

 Working Group convergence was reasonably strong.  There were some
 spirited discussions regarding scope, mechanism, and methodology,
 but on the whole, the resulting product is the result of a broad
 Working Group consensus.

Protocol Quality

 The language design is complex and somewhat daunting because the problem
 is intrinsicly messy.  In a broad sense, it captures the current best
 thinking on these topics in a way which will enable more automated
 operation of large networks, more automatic analysis of various routing
 pathologies, and should promote the engineering coordination between
 network operators.

 There are two implementations of parser/analyzer/databases for RPSL and
 interoperability testing is being planned.