Re: [Ietf-and-github] [Ext] GIT WG disposition

[Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]>]

Hi, Carsten,

On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 2:04 PM Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 2021-06-24, at 20:23, Spencer Dawkins at IETF <
> [e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > A day or two before that, I tripped over a bug that kramdown-rfc2629
> currently produces v2 rfcxml (aka xml2rfc v2 input),
>
> (That is not the bug.)
> Kramdown-rfc2629 actually produces output that is optimized for conversion
> by xml2rfc into whatever xml2rfc happens to consider to be the v3 of the
> day.
> (Using the --v3 flag on kramdown-rfc2629 enables using all of the v3
> features and gives up v2 compatibility for that.)
>
> > but xml2rfc command-line by default assumes --v3. If it sees v2 input,
> it internally runs the v2->v3 converter,
>
> Exactly, but that is designed to eat v3-in-a-v2-shell as produced by
> kramdown-rfc.
>
> > so the tools team needs to change the datatracker's submit code (which
> uses xml2rfc as a library) to run v2v3 when it sees v2 now instead of just
> running the v2 parser.
>
> Right, *that* is the bug (i.e., trying to stick to pre-transition software
> when the <rfc> element doesn’t happen to look just right).
> (Note that the pre-transition software is *not* being used by the RFC
> production center, so this approach is not only the wrong one to run a
> transition, but also produces late surprises when publishing the document
> as an RFC.)
>

Of course, I owe everyone who maintains the tools I use a mention of
appreciation - I understand how to USE them in most cases unless something
goes sideways, but don't understand the ins and outs well enough to be
comfortable opening github issues, TRAC issues, or dropping email to
tools-discuss, unless I'm pretty sure I'm not wasting their/your time!

My apologies about anything else I mischaracterized, of course.

And now, I hope, back to the search for a place that makes sense to talk
about commonly used IETF draft production tools, some, but not all, being
under control of the tools team ...

Best,

Spencer


> > This one was discussed in a TRAC ticket, by Robert Sparks' request (at
> https://trac.ietf.org/trac/ietfdb/ticket/3305).
>
> Indeed, and I look forward to getting that fixed.
>
> I still recommend generating the .v2v3.xml before going to datatracker's
> submission interface, so there is more control over the generation process;
> it has not always been clear what version of xml2rfc is running under the
> submission process (sometimes weird environmental issues such as locale
> mess this up).
>
> (If the above sounds a bit jaded:  The transition strategy used by xml2rfc
> works exceedingly well, and I have a lot of respect for Henrik and others
> getting this right at such an amazing level of precision.  It’s just
> incredibly frustrating when that great tool then is wedged into a
> submission process that doesn’t handle the transition as well.)
>
> Grüße, Carsten
>
>