In message <51881140(_dot_)5070904(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>, Brian E Carpenter
writes:
On 07/05/2013 02:10, l(_dot_)wood(_at_)surrey(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk wrote:
http://labs.apnic.net/blabs/?p=309
an excellent detective story on badly-written, poorly edited, standards
track RFCs leading to interop pro
blems. Enjoy.
I don't that is quite right. The problem in this case is not to do
with linguistic quality. It's due to a lack of formal verification
among a set of interacting and cross-area RFCs. (And the problem
is wider, because there are two distinct places in IETF standards
where ABNF for the text representation of IPv6 addresses can be
found.) This is a case where no amount of language editing would
have helped. Actually I used it a couple of months ago in a
discussion with some experts on formal verification, and they rather
liked it as a poster child for the need for formal methods in SDOs.
Brian
Apples mail client is broken [IPv6:2001:df9::4015:1430:8367:2073:5d0]
is not legal according to both RFC 5321 and RFC 2821 which is all
that applies here. RFC 2821 was consistent with RFC 2373 and the
SMTP literal spec has remained frozen since then which you want
when you are trying to promote long term interoperability.
Now one could update RFC 5321 to accept the above :: instead of a
single :0: but you could never legally send it.
Note for IPv4 [070.0.0.0] is 70.0.0.0 not 56.0.0.0 despite the fact
that many system will take 070.0.0.0 and send to 56.0.0.0.
Mark
--
Mark Andrews, ISC
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PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka(_at_)isc(_dot_)org