Re: Gen-ART Telechat Review of draft-ietf-karp-routing-tcp-analysis-06

[Nick Hilliard <[e-mail]>]

On 18/12/2012 22:50, Ben Campbell wrote:
> I think Nick's email was a review of the document in general, 

yes, sorry, it was.  I hit reply when I saw the subject line.

> I don't think so. This draft does not establish a standard, or define a
> protocol. While I don't speak for the authors, I don't think it's
> intended to make normative statements about anything. The language is
> descriptive, not prescriptive.

ok, noted.

> (I agree "has to" is an awkward substitute for the non-normative "must".
> I agree that "must" should generally be avoided when there can be
> confusion about the normativeness of a statement. I'm not sure that's
> the case here, since the whole doc is non-normative. And I think we
> could find better language even when the confusion is possible.)

"needs to"?  "ought to"?  It's all massively context dependent though.
What's needed are some words / phrases which are defined to have local
imperative scope only or else nonlocal informative "must" - but yeah it's
messy and generally will involve nontrivial wordsmithing to work around
what is meant.

Nick