[Tools-discuss] Missing draftname component

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

I know that idnits is another tool that is in the cellars of the technical debt department, but I wanted to point out one misfeature that should not be repeated in any reimplementation:

  ** Missing revision: the document name given in the document,
     'draft-ietf-core-href-latest', does not give the document revision number

  ~~ Missing draftname component: the document name given in the document,
     'draft-ietf-core-href-latest', does not seem to contain all the document
     name components required ('draft' prefix, document source, document name,
     and revision) -- see https://www.ietf.org/id-info/guidelines#naming for
     more information.

  == Mismatching filename: the document gives the document name as
     'draft-ietf-core-href-latest', but the file name used is
     'draft-ietf-core-href’

Of course, idnits is right here: the version of the draft that it saw is not ready for submission.  It uses Martin Thomson’s widely spread convention of using draft-…-latest as the docname and draft-… (no revision number) as the filename.

But this is the most likely status of the draft where I’ll look for idnits!
Tacking on an actual revision number happens when I’m long done fixing editorial issues like the ones idnits reports.

When I pointed out this misfeature to Henrik a few years ago, he correctly stated that the draft was not ready for submission, so it was idnits’ duty to report this.  Correct, but generating three (sometimes four) error messages for the most common situation is wasting everyone’s time, a single “Not ready for submission while using »-latest« docname/filename convention” would be as correct (and it might even help fixing errors in using that convention).  

I offer this as an example for one of the many places where our tools do not attempt to support the authoring process, but simply assume that this process is already completed for the document that is being processed.

(I don’t really expect fixing this misfeature to be fast-tracked before the idnits re-write that has been impending for a few years.)

Grüße, Carsten

PS.:

  == There are 16 instances of lines with non-ascii characters in the document.

Yeah.  Which characters?

(Kramdown-rfc has a utility “echars” that you may want to try:

*** Latin-1 Supplement (Latin)
ä: U+00E4    3 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS
ü: U+00FC    2 LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
*** General Punctuation (Common)
—: U+2014    1 EM DASH
*** Mathematical Operators (Common)
≥: U+2265    1 GREATER-THAN OR EQUAL TO
*** Box Drawing (Common)
─: U+2500  131 BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT HORIZONTAL
│: U+2502   24 BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT VERTICAL
├: U+251C    2 BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT VERTICAL AND RIGHT
┤: U+2524    2 BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT VERTICAL AND LEFT
╭: U+256D    4 BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT ARC DOWN AND RIGHT
╮: U+256E    4 BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT ARC DOWN AND LEFT
╯: U+256F    4 BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT ARC UP AND LEFT
╰: U+2570    4 BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT ARC UP AND RIGHT

So it uses Universität, Keränen and Amsüss, an em-dash, some math, and drawing characters for the plaintext version of a set of railroad syntax diagrams.)