Tony Hansen <tony(_at_)att(_dot_)com> wrote:
John C Klensin wrote:
In RFC 2821bis-01, Section 4.2.1 (Reply Code Severities and Theory), in
the description of the generic 4yz category, described the desired
action in terms of what the client "is encouraged to" do. I was
persuaded in an off-list exchange that this can reasonably be changed to
"SHOULD" and -01 reflects that change. For 5yz, there was a similar
construction that indicates that the client "is discouraged from"
repeating the request. I was less confident about changing that to
"SHOULD NOT", so the "is discouraged" text remains in -01.
Question: Should the 5yz description be changed to use "SHOULD NOT".
If not, is "SHOULD" in the 4yz description reasonable?
<snip>
For 4yz, this does not show any consensus to change from SHOULD.
For 5yz, there is a trend to use SHOULD NOT instead of "is discouraged",
but the numbers are too low to really call a consensus yet.
I'd like to endorse that course of action. We can argue whether some
other wording is more technically accurate; but matching a SHOULD against
a SHOULD NOT is the easiest to read and technically correct. (Anybody
who can't figure out a few cases where it's time to stop beating the
dead horse, or the problem "has been fixed" needs to be reading a quite
different document!)
--
John Leslie <john(_at_)jlc(_dot_)net>