Hi Andrew,
On 2011-02-24 16:28 Andrew Sullivan said:
On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 10:18:10AM -0500, Worley, Dale R (Dale) wrote:
I would expect that the idnits rules change only very slowly. What is the
real story on that?
They seem to change more quickly than people realise. Also, of
course, a whole bunch of changes can go by between a given
contributor's last I-D, and a current one. Not all the changes are
intentional; they're often pretty clearly based on heuristics that as
often as not look to me like they're derived from what certain tools
do. So then if someone submits something that doesn't do exactly what
those tools do, they get a false failure.
Note that none of this is to attack the tools developers. I've ranted
before about the absurdity of checking the formatting of early drafts
for perfection, so I won't bother again.
Still, I feel that the characterization above is less than spot-on. Idnits
in submission-checking mode only returns errors for a few selected things
out of the myriad of things it is able to check, and those things are
clearly required by http://www.ietf.org/id-info/1id-guidelines.txt .
Only errors will prevent an automatic draft submission from going through;
ignore the warnings and comments to your heart's content for that purpose.
If you have examples of drafts which conform to the submission requirements
of 1id-guidelines.txt, but don't pass the submission check mode of idnits,
*please* tell me about them so I can fix things.
The ratio of gripes against idnits to actual bug reports is getting to
be a bit annoying; and I'd like to suggest that people either submit
bug reports, or direct the complaints against the requirements of
1id-guidelines.txt rather than against the tool which checks the
requirements if the problem is that the requirements are too strict.
Henrik
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