Re: [precis] draft-whited-precis-test-vectors-00

Hi Sam,

Two points.

First, I also think this work is valuable but I don't understand how the 
ID is supposed to proceed. The point of bringing it to IETF is to get 
its authority behind the statement that these specific vectors test 
conformance to the PRECIS RFCs. How can the IETF give this without 
restarting the WG to push the ID forwards as a Standards Track RFC? I 
don't think the independent submission review process can.

Second, my experience is that formatting of test vectors is kinda all 
over the place in RFCs. I would not look there for guidance. Idk what 
XML format you refer to but I wouldn't want to go down any XML road as 
either producer or consumer. I suggest you devise the simplest 
machine-readable file format that you can imagine and publish it 
yourself, e.g. as a Github gist. Anyone can then easily transform that 
into any other format, for documentation, for a unit test data provider, 
or whatever. I think this serves your and our needs best even in the 
case that IETF would adopt the ID, since you can use the file to 
generate IETF-format docs.

For example, I was recently using this wonderful text file 
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-test.txt which is 
both documentation and machine readable. Your ID is machine readable 
(what isn't these days?) but it isn't so simple to either read or write. 
In your position I'd look at UCD files for format ideas.

Tom

-- 
Tom Worster 
skype: spinitron.tom  -  857 210 3243  - tom@spinitron.com

On 6 Dec 2018, at 10:15, Sam Whited wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 5, 2018, at 12:33, Marc Blanchet wrote:
>> haven’t seen any trafic on this, while the doc is (to me) useful.
>> Might consider sending it to the Independent Series Editor. See more
>> information here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/about/independent/
>
> Hi Marc, thanks for the followup.
>
> I've been meaning to go back and double check that there aren't any 
> duplicate vectors covering the same edge cases and prepare an update, 
> but I haven't found a good way to format the test data still so I'd be 
> hesitant to submit it (and there's practically no information about 
> how to format things or write this awful XML format). I've also tried 
> looking into the process, and the various IETF sites are inscrutable 
> and full of contradictory information, so thanks for the link, I'll 
> look into it and see if that would be an easier path, but no promises.
>
> —Sam
>
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