Re: [Ltru] Suggested text for future compatibility of registryprocessors.

Hi -

As a technical contributor...

> From: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@icu-project.org>
> To: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>
> Cc: "LTRU Working Group" <ltru@ietf.org>
> Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2007 4:55 PM
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Suggested text for future compatibility of registryprocessors.
>
> Your changes sound fine by me. I do have a question. I thought MAY was only
> capitalized when it was in reference to conformance to this document. But in
> that statement it doesn't seem to apply: it doesn't appear that we in this
> document can make any conformance promises (positive or negative) about
> future versions since that is entirely in the hands of the IETF.
...

I was looking at it from a protocol specification perspective.
When defining an extensible protocol, using SHOULD, MUST, etc.
makes sense when specifying the nature of permissible extensions.

If we wanted to be really pedantic, for example, we could spell out that
future extensions MUST NOT violate the syntax established for "record"
in the ABNF.  (If we were indeed going to make a commitment to forward
compatibility in the registry format.  At this point, we haven't constrained
ourselves in this way, and please don't read this example as an argument
that we should constrain ourselves in this way.  Indeed, I think we really
need to discourage implementations (other than very specialized developer
tools) from reading the registry itself, in much the same way as network
management applications don't dynamically query the IANA enterprise number
assignments.)

Randy

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