SHOULD meaning "do it unless you have a good reason not to do it"
as opposed to MUST meaning "do it under all circumstances" is a
term that I have found useful over the years.
It is particularly useful when you want to set defaults in a control
protocol, but recognise that operators may wish to express
an alternative behaviour in a configured system.
It is also useful in some backwards compatible situations.
Stewart
On 09/08/2016 23:52, Scott O. Bradner wrote:
my only suggestion would be to consider removing SHOULD
(semi-serious)
Scott
On Aug 9, 2016, at 4:08 PM, Barry Leiba <barryleiba(_at_)computer(_dot_)org>
wrote:
This draft should be self-explanatory -- and please be sure to look at
Section 1.1 for some explanations that may short-cut some of the
discussion.
The bottom line is to update BCP 14 (RFC 2119) to
(1) make it clear that the key words MUST(/NOT), SHOULD(/NOT), and MAY
are only key words when they're in ALL CAPS, and
(2) deprecate the use of the variants (SHALL, RECOMMENDED, OPTIONAL)
so as to avoid reserving an unnecessarily number of key words.
Discussion here, please, before Ben, who has kindly agreed to
AD-sponsor this, sends it out for last call. And we do expect there
to be some significant discussion on this one.
Barry
On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 2:55 PM, <internet-drafts(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org> wrote:
A new version of I-D, draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt
has been successfully submitted by Barry Leiba and posted to the
IETF repository.
Name: draft-leiba-rfc2119-update
Revision: 00
Title: Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words
Document date: 2016-08-09
Group: Individual Submission
Pages: 4
URL:
https://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt
Status: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update/
Htmlized: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00
Abstract:
RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol
specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by
clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the
defined special meanings, and by deprecating some versions of the key
words.