Re: My two cents on draft-leiba-rfc2119-update

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 11/08/2016 04:49, Barry Leiba wrote:
...
> There *is* a problem that this is fixing: we (collectively) spend a
> lot of time messing with this -- discussing, in document after
> document, whether lower-case versions matter, and what should be what.
> This document is attempting to get rough-consensus answers so the
> questions don't have to be re-argued over and over.

Yes, I believe we have two real problems with RFC 2119 itself:

1. When a draft cites RFC 2119 *and* contains lower case instances
of the RFC 2119 keywords, it is often unclear whether all those
instances are intentionally "normal English" or whether they are
typing mistakes. Some text to clarify what BCP 14 intends to say
about that would be helpful, and what this draft says about seems
fine (whether published as BCP or as commentary).

2. Uses of SHOULD are often unclear about the exceptions. The raw
definition ("there may exist valid reasons...") is all one can
say in a generic definition but it seems to me that we should
expect specific guidance about what those reasons might be in
each case. However, that is quite rare. (Before anyone checks,
I am just as guilty in this respect as anyone else.) This tends
to degrade SHOULD until it's almost the same as MAY.

However, no amount of fixing RFC 2119, or commentary on it, can
solve those two problems - only careful document review can do that.

On 11/08/2016 05:27, Melinda Shore wrote:
...
> I'd like to think that our review processes are robust enough
> to catch misuse.

As others have said, that may be optimistic, but making BCP 14
more complicated to understand won't help authors or reviewers
who already find this aspect of IETF bureaucracy annoying.

Regards
   Brian