RFC 5952, the errata, and real-world usage

"Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@boeing.com> Wed, 30 May 2012 00:14 UTC

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From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@boeing.com>
To: "ipv6@ietf.org" <ipv6@ietf.org>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 19:14:18 -0500
Subject: RFC 5952, the errata, and real-world usage
Thread-Topic: RFC 5952, the errata, and real-world usage
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I'm sure that I'm remembering correctly that we had quite a few posts, back and forth, about whether or not IPv6 addresses should be represented in lower case hexadecimal. And as I recall, the WG consensus seemed to be that upper case hex was a somewhat "dated" way of showing hex, and that addresses looked better in lower case.

Next thing you know, I'm going along based on this recollection, I look up RFC 5952, and I notice there's now an "errata" associated with it. Would that errata be about some grammatical minutiae? Nope. It's specifically to switch back to upper case hex representation! The errata says MUST for uppercase use, not even SHOULD, let alone MAY.

Then I notice that Win7 uses upper case hex for physical addresses, but lower case for IPv6 addresses. And to be even more weird, the DUID for IPv6 is shown in upper case.

So my question is, what transpired after all those discussions about this subject? Has the "errata" to RFC 5952 been written but ignored? Did I just miss the discussions on the errata? Is common usage trumping any errata? In short, should I be using upper case or lower case, for IPv6 addresses?

Bert