Re: [Extra] AD Review of draft-ietf-extra-imap4rev2

[Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>]

>>> Section 2.2.1
>>>
>>>   Clients MUST follow the syntax outlined in this specification
>>>    strictly.  It is a syntax error to send a command with missing or
>>>    extraneous spaces or arguments.
>>>
>>> It seems unnecessary to say this in a standards track document.  There’s a similar paragraph in Section 2.2.2.
>>
>> I think the text is there due to various bugs in implementations, so I would rather keep it as is.
>
> I would use "need to" instead of "MUST" here.  It's otherwise a bit hand-wavy for use of BCP 14 language.

Over the years, we have seen a LOT of implementations that mess this
up, thinking that because IMAP command streams are "readable", they
can add spaces to "improve readability", and then they complain that
things break.  Because of that, I think it's important to have this
text, and I think it's important to use BCP 14 language (it's a *real*
interoperability issue).  I feel pretty strongly about this, as
someone who's many times had to help people fix their implementations
because they weren't warned explicitly about it.

Barry