Oh many purist networking geeks joined large corporations so that these corporations began to push IPv6 in a direction set by the geeks. They understood that as independent geeks they have essentially no say in the evolution of IPv6. My favorite example here is Android refusing to support stateful DHCPv6; it's clear that it's being pushed by purist networking geeks inside Google.
With IPv6 RAs, there's no need for DHCPv6. I don't use it at all and I use IPv6 just fine on mobile. One place where DHCPv6 may make some sense is the router<->WAN/ISP connection. However once your router has a IPv6 prefix, it can easily advertise it on your LAN/WLAN for devices to capture it via IPv6 RAs for its IPv6 autoconfiguration which Just Works. Given that Android devices will attach to a WLAN router (and not directly to your WAN/ISP) it makes sense for there to be no DHCPv6 as it's not necessary for end user devices that aren't expected to be attached directly to the WAN/ISP.
My home network doesn't use stateful DHCPv6 either. I agree there's no need.
The bigger thing is carrying this "you don't need it" attitude to a product used by billions. Thousands of network operators who do not believe in "you don't need it" are now forced to make their network work for Android. If those purists had guts they should go to the IETF and formally deprecate stateful DHCPv6.
> My favorite example here is Android refusing to support stateful DHCPv6; it's clear that it's being pushed by purist networking geeks inside Google.
If you read the huge bug on it, Google's counter argument is stateful dhcpv6 significantly complicates tethering to the point of needing an ipv6 nat. That's a very practical position to take, hardly "purist network objectionists"
So what? The Linux kernel already supports NAT66. Android uses the Linux kernel. I use Tailscale and when I use an IPv6-only node as the exit node, NAT66 is being used. Use `ip6tables -t nat -vnL` to check. You can also grep for `v6nat = true` in Tailscale logs.
It's those purists at Google that decide that NAT66 is evil and should not be used and therefore they have chosen not to support stateful DHCPv6.
