Re: [Tools-discuss] Idnits-1.84 feedback

Hi Scott,

on 2006-01-03 20:01 Scott Hollenbeck said the following:
> I just ran a document through the idnits checker.  It produced some
> unexpected results:

[snip]

> It looks like the tool is checking for 2006 copyright dates now that we're
> in 2006, but that will be a problem for documents that were written in 2005.

You're right, it's checking for copyright dates matching the current year.
I think this is strictly speaking correct, but wouldn't mind adding a grace
period just after each new year.  (Of course, that conflicts with the
current policy with respect to boilerplate, which is to require letter-
perfect adherence, with a male author not even being permitted to change
"he or she" to "he"; something I personally think is silly, but nevermind.)

Any suggestion as to the length of such a grace period?

Or should I instead add a switch to make it possible to say something like

  $ idnits --year 2005 draft-ietf-sieve-3431bis-04.txt

and have idnits accept the given year instead of the current year in copyright
text, maybe?

> The BCP 78 error is interesting.  The text is in the document, but it exists
> after the copyright notice.  Did the tool skip it because of the copyright
> date error?

Yes.  If the text had been in a separate paragraph, it would have been
recognized, but I do some extra work to also recognize multiple boiler-plate
paragraphs which has been contracted into one.  This is done by concatenating
potential boilerplate paragraphs and matching the aggregate against the
current paragraph, and thus fails when one of the parts in the input text
fails to match.

A strategy of instead trying to split paragraphs in the draft input into
potential individual boilerplate paragraphs would not fail in this way, but
would also (I think) be quite a bit more complex.  I may consider re-writing
to do in the future, but won't do it now.

	Henrik

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