[Acme] John Scudder's Discuss on draft-ietf-acme-integrations-13: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[John Scudder via Datatracker <[e-mail]>]

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draft-ietf-acme-integrations-13: Discuss

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DISCUSS:
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# John Scudder, RTG AD, comments for draft-ietf-acme-integrations-13
CC @jgscudder

## DISCUSS

This is an informational document but is using RFC 2119 keywords as though it
were standards track. Most of these uses are in Section 8, but there are two in
Sections 4 and 5. For example,

   If the CSR includes an identifier that the EST RA does not control,
   the RA MUST respond with a 4xx HTTP [RFC9110] error code.

That reads as though you are imposing the requirement de novo. I assume that is
not correct, and what you're actually doing is describing what the underlying
standards track document mandates. If that's the case, here and in other places
you use 2119-style requirement keywords, it seems to me that you should reword
to make it clear you're describing the consequences of an existing requirement,
not creating a new one. On the other hand, if you're creating a new
requirement, then shouldn't this be a standards track document?

An example of the former approach, with the quoted sentence, might be to reword
it like

   If the CSR includes an identifier that the EST RA does not control,
   the RA will respond with a 4xx HTTP [RFC9110] error code.

I just changed "MUST" to "will", or if you want to be more specific could
interpolate something like,

   If the CSR includes an identifier that the EST RA does not control,
   an RA that follows the requirements of RFC XXXX Sec YY
   will respond with a 4xx HTTP [RFC9110] error code.

The uses in Section 8 are more difficult for me; not being at all expert in
this area I'm unable to reliably tell which if any of the MUSTs (and SHOULDs
and so on) you're imposing are actually new requirements.

If you think there really are new requirements being imposed here that don't
exist in the base document, but that this document really is only
informational, please help me understand how to resolve this seeming
contradiction. Thanks in advance.

(As an aside to the shepherd, I had hoped that item 11 of the shepherd writeup
would help me understand how to resolve this question, but sadly the "why is
this the proper type of RFC" portion was left unanswered. Maybe the shepherd
was also bamboozled.)


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COMMENT:
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## NITS

"defintions" -> "definitions"

"Using graph theory" -> perhaps, "in the terminology of graph theory" or "to
use the terminology of graph theory"?

"Roots CAs" -> "Root CAs"?

"The EST Registration Authority (RA) is configured with the DNS domain which it
will issue certificates." That should be "for which", right?

## Notes

This review is in the ["IETF Comments" Markdown format][ICMF], You can use the
[`ietf-comments` tool][ICT] to automatically convert this review into
individual GitHub issues.

[ICMF]: https://github.com/mnot/ietf-comments/blob/main/format.md
[ICT]: https://github.com/mnot/ietf-comments