ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Making RFC2119 key language easier to Protocol Readers

2013-01-05 03:00:40
We can fix that, by discussing it further, or as Scott mentioned make
a survey within IETF [*]

[*] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg76582.html

AB

On 1/5/13, Abdussalam Baryun <abdussalambaryun(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
(was Re: I'm struggling with 2219 language again)

Where you want to use MUST is where an implementation might be tempted
to take a short cut -- to the detriment of the Internet -- but could
do so without actually breaking interoperability. A good example is
with retransmissions and exponential backoff. You can implement those
incorrectly (or not at all), and still get "interoperability". I.e.,
two machines can talk to each other. Maybe you don't get "good"
intereoperability and maybe not great performance under some
conditions, but you can still build an interoperabile implementation.

IMO, too many specs seriously overuse/misuse 2119 language, to the
detriment of readability, common sense, and reserving the terms to
bring attention to those cases where it really is important to
highlight an important point that may not be obvious to a casual
reader/implementor.

Sadly true.

We can fix that, by discussing it further, or as Scott mentioned the survey
[*]

two machines can talk to each other. Maybe you don't get "good"
intereoperability and maybe not great performance under some
conditions, but you can still build an interoperabile implementation.

As machines reads and writes may depend on conditions, I don't think
it is true that you can still interoperabile implementation by
ignoring using/documenting requirement keys language (i.e. all common
keys of all languages).

AB