[forces] AD review of draft-ietf-forces-interop

["Adrian Farrel" <[e-mail]>]

Hi authors of draft-ietf-forces-interop,

I have done my usual AD review of your document as part of processing
the publication request. The intention of the review is to catch issues
that might show up in IETF last call or IESG review and thereby
improve the efficiency of those review stages.

There are a few small issues that I would like you to address with a
new revision. As always, my comments are open for discussion and
disagreement.

I have placed the document into "Revised I-D Needed" state in the
datatracker until we resolve these small points.

Thanks for the work,
Adrian

---

I believe the intention of this work is to provide supplementary
information on top of that already contained in RFC 6053. In view of
that, you are correct to state that this document updates RFC 6053. To
achieve that smoothly you need to:

- Add a piece of metadata to the top of the file to read:

Updates: 6053 (if approved)

  (see http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mpls-ldp-ipv6/ for an
   example)

- Explain the update in the Abstract. I'd suggest...

   RFC 6053 reported the results of the first ForCES interoperability
   test, and this document updates RFC 6053 by providing further
   interoperability results.

The additional context to the update that you give in the Introduction
is perfect.

---

I am worried by the references to two I-Ds. [I-D.ietf-forces-lfb-lib]
and [I-D.ietf-forces-ceha] were I-Ds at the time of testing.  There is
no law against this, but it gives us a problem:

The versions tested need to be pinned in time. For example, 
draft-ietf-forces-lfb-lib will probably be published as an RFC before
your document becomes an RFC, but it would not be correct to say that
you tested that RFC. So, I think you need some text talking about the
draft versions tested and giving specific name to the drafts rather than
just pointing at the citation.

I can probably help you draft some text here, but I think that it would 
be quickest for you to try to write down what you tested, and then I can
polish it.

---

The references are all to pot! idnits shows this up clearly and you need
to fix this before the draft can go forward.

(The uses of IP addresses flagged by idnits are OK and do not need to be
changed.)

---

The use of RFC 2119 language is a problem and needs to be fixed. 

You are not defining protocol behavior in this document and do not need
section 2.1 at all. 

Then you need to go through the document and clean up the upper case. If
you are making a direct quote from another RFC, then please make it much
clearer using indentation, quote marks, and by saying
   "As stated in [RFC1234]:"

If you are not quoting, then you really can use lower case. But please 
be careful even then. What would it mean to say "An implementation must
do this"? Would it really be the case that you mean: "We tested to see
whether an implementation does this as required in section 1.2 or 
[RFC1234]"?

---

I have a personal dislike of repeated definitions copied from other 
documents. They can cause all sorts of fun if you make a mistake when
you copy the text!  So I would prefer section 2.2. simply to point at 
the definitions from other RFCs.

However, I think this is a matter of style, and I do not insist that
you make this change.

---

Section 3.1 says:

   Some errata related to ForCES document were found by the
   interoperability test.  The errata has been reported to related IETF
   RFCs.

This is great. IMHO it is a more valuable outcome than the rest of the
work :-) If you can find a way to briefly list these or provide pointers
to the errata reports, I think this would be really nice and would help
validate all your hard work.