Literally all we had to do was add a byte to IPv4 and we'd be done but noooo we need to overengineer the next protocol and make it as painful as possible to adopt.
Why one byte? Is that enough bytes? An extra 4 bits each for source and destination? Maxing out at 2^36 addresses? That seems uncomfortably small safety margin.
this keeps coming up, if you add a byte to ipv4 you still have a transition problem. 5 byte machines can't talk to 4 byte machines. pretty much the only thing that solves is people not liking the :: syntax. the only other change is auto configuration, which...kind of doesn't matter? is that really causing problems?
> ... but noooo we need to overengineer ...
We need to pretend we overengineer. But some in the committee made it sure data exfil would be basically impossible to detect / block with IPv6, which all the others, always in love with the most rube-goldberg design possibles, loved the "overengineered" solution.
With rube-goldberg designs, you can then always say stuff like:
"The xz backdoor was TOTALLY unrelated to systemd"
Yet it only concerned distro that shipped with systemd.
Go figure.
It's always "because insert-crazy-non-sensical-hair-pulling-reason-here".
Ah yes, it's because of that. So it's so totally unrelated right?
Except it still only affect distro using systemd.
Or maybe, you know, backdoors and exfils were the plan from the very start.
"The protocol won't work correctly unless you let crazy ping packets doing you-know-what". And nobody is ever going to properly firewall all that.
Overengineering is one thing, yes.
But we know for a fact that there are xxxINTs infiltrating committees and pushing "solutions" that are only solutions to them.
That would be just as hard to switch to and even more complex. If you think ipv6 is over engineered you haven't had to deal with ipv4. (Source routing is a pain)