At 10:45 17-03-10, The IESG wrote:
The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider
the following document:
- 'Definitions for expressing standards requirements in IANA registries.'
<draft-ogud-iana-protocol-maintenance-words-03.txt> as a BCP
The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
The Intended Status is listed as "Standards Track" whereas the
announcement says BCP.
Quoting Section 1:
"The DNSEXT working group decided to try to decrease the number of
algorithms listed in the registry and add a column to the registry
listing the requirements level for each one. Upon reading that
HMAC-MD5 was tagged as "OBSOLETE" a firestorm started."
Do we really have to call a duck by another name to quell a firestorm? :-)
"A now expired draft (draft-hoffman-additional-key-words) attempted
to establish these additions as new keywords but was never fully
adopted."
That's "Work in Progress".
Section 2 defines terminology. Are the RFC 2119 keywords really
necessary? For example, MANDATORY (Section 3.1) is defined as:
"This is the strongest requirement and for an implementation to ignore
it there MUST be a valid and serious reason."
Based on my reading, this means that I can ignore a mandatory
requirement if I can find a valid reason to do so.
I take it that DISCRETIONARY means that we don't care whether you do
or don't do it. A MAY in RFC 2119 terms means optional.
In Section 3.3, OBSOLETE (for operations) is defined as MUST be
phased out. For implementations, it means SHOULD NOT support this
functionality. I could use RFC 4892 and RFC 5001 as examples. :-)
In Section 3.7, the term AVAILABLE is defined. Any implementation
claiming to know the meaning of this unallocated code MUST NOT be
used. If I am not mistaken, there was such a case last year. Some
people will read "AVAILABLE" as free for use.
I unfortunately cannot support this document as it would only
encourage the usual discussions about keywords and I doubt that
introducing new terms would have the intended effect.
Regards,
-sm
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