Re: [precis] Adam Roach's Yes on draft-ietf-precis-7700bis-08: (with COMMENT)

[Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]>]

On 7/5/17 4:13 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
> Adam Roach has entered the following ballot position for
> draft-ietf-precis-7700bis-08: Yes
> 
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> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> COMMENT:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> I like the clear explanation of some of the design choices in here (e.g., the
> rationale for using NFKC).
> 
> There are two places that I think a slight bit of additional text might be
> useful:
> 
> 1. When talking about processing "each string" in section 2.4, it's probably
> worth noting that implementations should be careful not to assume that any
> information received from a wire protocol has necessarily had any of the rules
> in this document applied to it (as this might allow intentionally noncompliant
> clients to slip certain kinds of shenanigans past their checks); and

draft-ietf-precis-7564bis contains the following sentence:

   When an application applies a profile of a PRECIS string class, it
   transforms an input string (which might or might not be conforming)
   into an output string that definitively conforms to the profile.

It strikes me that something similar would be useful here, especially
the concepts of "input string" and "output string".

> 2. Where the final paragraph of section 4 indicates that the operations in this
> document are not necessarily idempotent, it is probably worth being more
> explicit that they should be applied repeatedly until the output string is
> stable; or, if the string does not stabilize after a reasonable number of
> iterations (is this possible?), that it should be rejected as invalid.

Thanks for the suggestion; although we might think that's implicit in
the notion of non-idempotence, it's much better to make the
ramifications and handling explicit. I'll add this text in the post-IESG
version.

Peter