Re: New Version Notification for draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt

[Joe Touch <[e-mail]>]

Although I agree with dropping SHALL/SHALL NOT and requiring uppercase,
I'm not sure it's useful to drop REQUIRED, RECOMMENDED, and OPTIONAL.

I.e., MUST/MAY/SHOULD are directives to a person. The others are
adjectives describing the resulting features.

I appreciate that we say things like "X is a MUST", but it hurts
readability vs. "X is REQUIRED".

I'm in favor of retaining those three adjectives.


Joe


On 8/9/2016 1:08 PM, Barry Leiba wrote:
> This draft should be self-explanatory -- and please be sure to look at
> Section 1.1 for some explanations that may short-cut some of the
> discussion.
>
> The bottom line is to update BCP 14 (RFC 2119) to
> (1) make it clear that the key words MUST(/NOT), SHOULD(/NOT), and MAY
> are only key words when they're in ALL CAPS, and
> (2) deprecate the use of the variants (SHALL, RECOMMENDED, OPTIONAL)
> so as to avoid reserving an unnecessarily number of key words.
>
> Discussion here, please, before Ben, who has kindly agreed to
> AD-sponsor this, sends it out for last call.  And we do expect there
> to be some significant discussion on this one.
>
> Barry
>
> On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 2:55 PM,  <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> A new version of I-D, draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt
>> has been successfully submitted by Barry Leiba and posted to the
>> IETF repository.
>>
>> Name:           draft-leiba-rfc2119-update
>> Revision:       00
>> Title:          Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words
>> Document date:  2016-08-09
>> Group:          Individual Submission
>> Pages:          4
>> URL:            https://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt
>> Status:         https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update/
>> Htmlized:       https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00
>>
>>
>> Abstract:
>>    RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol
>>    specifications.  This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by
>>    clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the
>>    defined special meanings, and by deprecating some versions of the key
>>    words.
>>