[alto] Paul Wouters' Discuss on draft-ietf-alto-cost-mode-03: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Paul Wouters via Datatracker <[e-mail]>]

Paul Wouters has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-alto-cost-mode-03: Discuss

When responding, please keep the subject line intact and reply to all
email addresses included in the To and CC lines. (Feel free to cut this
introductory paragraph, however.)


Please refer to https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/iesg/statements/handling-ballot-positions/ 
for more information about how to handle DISCUSS and COMMENT positions.


The document, along with other ballot positions, can be found here:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-alto-cost-mode/



----------------------------------------------------------------------
DISCUSS:
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Probably an easily answered issue, but I am not too familiar with ALTO.

     The string MUST be no more than 32 characters, and it MUST NOT contain
     characters other than [...]

Are there implementations that already deployed a cost string with more than 32
characters or characters not in this newly imposed set of characters? What
should happen if that is in use? That is, is this protocol modification
potentially breaking interoperability with older implementations?


----------------------------------------------------------------------
COMMENT:
----------------------------------------------------------------------

While no fan of "patch RFCs", thank you for at least putting the OLD and NEW
text in one document, so an implementer and reviewer doesn't have to switch
between documents and get confused about what was read was the old doc or new
doc.

That said, patching in the text "This document" feels a little weird. What RFC
does "This document" then refer to? Perhaps change "This document defines two
cost modes" to "Two cost modes are defined".

     Future documents that define a new cost mode SHOULD indicate

I think that SHOULD can be a MUST. Although one could question the 2119 usage
as it seems to be a directive to a document author and not a protocol action.
So I would also be okay with lowercasing this.