John,
I don't share your confusion. I do feel that to be able to
construct reasonably pleasant sentences, we need both the verb
SHOULD and the adjectival participle RECOMMENDED, and their
negatives, in various circumstances.
I could propose an alternative erratum, adding MANDATORY,
but I won't; it's NOT MANDATORY to increase confusion.
Regards
Brian
On 2011-09-13 04:41, John C Klensin wrote:
--On Monday, September 12, 2011 09:34 -0600 Peter Saint-Andre
<stpeter(_at_)stpeter(_dot_)im> wrote:
On 8/29/11 3:36 PM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
After staring at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/errata_search.php?eid=499 for long
enough, I finally decided to submit an I-D that is intended to
obsolete RFC 2119. I hope that I've been able to update and
clarify the text in a way that is respectful of the original.
Feedback is welcome.
http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-saintandre-2119bis-01.txt
Based on the feedback received, I do not plan to pursue
further work on that Internet-Draft. However, given that the
IETF Secretariat and the RFC Editor team already accept
documents that include "NOT RECOMMENDED" in the RFC 2119
boilerplate, does anyone see harm in verifying the
aforementioned erratum?
Sigh.
Sorry to make this more complicated but, IMO, the error in 2119
and, to some extent, recent practice, is in permitting
"RECOMMENDED" as a synonym for "SHOULD", not in failing to
permit its opposite. If one goes back to 2026, there is a
fairly clear separation between Technical Specifications" and
interoperability requirements (terminology for which appears in
2119) and the "Requirement levels" and conformance requirements
of Applicability Statements. Those levels, as specified in
Section 3.3 of RFC 2026, are "Required", "Recommended",
"Elective", "Limited Use", and "Not Recommended".
According to 2026, those requirement levels in AS documents
apply to entire TSs but I think we have sometimes relaxed that a
bit into statements about features within a TS. If AS
requirement level statements apply only to full TS
specifications, the use for "RECOMMENDED" as a statement about
interoperability requirements, synonymous with "SHOULD" is
merely somewhat confusing. If we are going to sometimes have
ASs that make statements at the feature level, then it is
disastrously so because the same term has an interoperability
meaning in one context, a conformance meaning in another, and
there may be no reliable way to deduce the difference.
To provide an additional focus for this, I've just filed
proposed erratum 2969
(http://www.rfc-editor.org/errata_search.php?rfc=2119&eid=2969)
that reflects the comments above. You now have a choice about
which one to approve :-)
regards,
john
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