John Klensin wrote:
That said, I think we should be paying careful attention to
Bruce's implied suggestion about how template
boilerplate-generators should be constructed.
Some clarification:
1. In the specific case of the troff/nroff rfc macros and template,
Ned's characterization of the text as boilerplate is inaccurate.
True boilerplate (IPR boilerplate, Copyright notices, Status of
this Memo, RFC-Editor funding Acknowledgment, even the canned
versions of IESG notes) are contained in the macro package, not
visible in an author/editor's source document and not emitted until
the document is formatted. The template is provided as a convenience
for authors/editors, and has some template text corresponding to the
basic recommended RFC structure, some hints on how to do things such
as include text that is present in a draft but disappears in RFC
form (e.g. a draft change history), etc. An author/editor is of
course free to ignore the template completely, using the macros with
a source document created from scratch, or modified from another
source document. The case might well be different for other means of
generating drafts and RFCs, where a "boilerplate" characterization
might be apropos, but it is not in this instance. "Placeholder"
would be a suitable term.
2. I posted what I had put in the template; others are of course free
to do nothing at all, to do something completely different, to do
something similar, or even to use the same text verbatim (it is not
copyrighted). I added the "...presence of this template text..."
part about 3 weeks ago during early parts of this discussion. I
thought it was a reasonable thing to do at the time, and I still
think so (if anything, I might be inclined to remove or comment out
the "no IANA considerations" text, which is in fact suggested wording
for that specific case and it appears on a single source line with the
other text (so failure to edit gets the whole thing, and explicit
action is required to make any change, whether that's to remove
the warning or to substitute real considerations). I'm not presuming
to suggest that others should do likewise. They are free to do so,
but to the extent that some people think that I'm some sort of whacko,
they might be inclined to do something contrary, and they are of
course also free so to do.
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