Re: A small change suggested

[Peter Eriksson <[e-mail]>]

>Peter writes:
>>into something saying that the tokens generated by a server must
>>use uppercase and that a client should be prepared to handle both
>>upper and lowercase characters?
>
>While I agree that there is little point in allowing the server to
>use lower- or mixed case, I don't see how fixing that and still
>requiring clients to handle either case is an improvement?  That

Well. I like the idea of "being liberal in what you accept, and
restrictive of what you send out". Suppose the Ident data is transmitted
over a line that converts all uppercase characters to lowercase....
(Not very likely :-)

>only means that client implementations will need extra code just
>to suit the specification, not to suit actual usage.  A bad idea...
>Maybe your point is that requirements on the client could be eased
>in a new edition of this RFC sometime in the future?  Hmm...

Yes, one would have to use a stricmp() or strcasecmp() (or whatever the
case insensitive string compare is called) instead of strcmp(). Not a big
deal really...

The point is that it would remove an incompatibility with RFC931 and it's
a pretty small change really. (It just adds the fact that a server should
send uppercase characters).

>Also, I'm a little surprised at this suggestion at this late hour,
>as I thought that for all practical purposes, discussion of the draft

Yes, I know. I just though I'd mention it anyway.

>was closed when submitted to the IESG?  In case it isn't, then I'd
>support the part about restricting the server, and I'd add that we
>ease the requirements on clients in the corresponding fashion.
>However, I don't think this change is important enough to wreak
>havoc with the drafting process, if that's what's required.

I don't think that either. If it's completely impossible to fix things
like this then it's no big deal for me either. 

>You tell me; I don't know.

/Peter

Peter Eriksson                                              [e-mail]
Lysator Academic Computer Society                 ...!uunet!lysator.liu.se!pen
University of Linkoping, Sweden                           I'm bored. Flame me.