Subject: Re: relay checking

From: Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 09:26:56 -0400

Henry Spencer wrote:

> To clarify my own position on this...
> 
[...]
> + I'm reluctant to demand full checking by relay agents which otherwise
> don't have reason to do it.  Even SHOULD seems too strong a word here. 
> 
> + I would *like* to see relay agents not only permitted, but explicitly
> encouraged, to do as much checking as they feel they can. 

Since SHOULD carries the same weight as RECOMMENDED, either there is
an inconsistency in your position or you believe that there is some
significant difference between "RECOMMENDED" and encouraged. So
please do clarify; how would an explicit recommendation not encourage
relay agent authors to "do as much checking as they feel they can"?

---

From: Henry Spencer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 15:08:13 -0400 (EDT)

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Bruce Lilly wrote:
> Since SHOULD carries the same weight as RECOMMENDED...

Most people believe that SHOULD (or the seldom-used RECOMMENDED) carries a
lot of weight -- that it is not just a suggestion or an encouragement, but
an emphatic recommendation that you disregard at your peril, although
unusual circumstances may occasionally justify violating it. 

There are a few people who persist in claiming that it doesn't really mean
that.  My concern is to communicate, and therefore I use SHOULD with its
consensus meaning. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       [email-masked]

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 23:28:06 GMT

In <[email-masked]> Henry Spencer <[email-masked]> writes:

>On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I thought Henry and I just agreed on language, and I'm curious as to why
>> you decided to go with this language instead...
>> I don't see a lot of purpose served in distinguishing between existence
>> and syntactic validity of headers.  I think that makes the logic of the
>> standard slightly more complex for no particularly clear reason.

>+ I see a small benefit from insisting on presence of mandatory headers,
>but only a small one.  It's unobjectionable but not very important.

I have written SHOULD. 

>don't have reason to do it.  Even SHOULD seems too strong a word here. 

I have written MAY.

>encouraged, to do as much checking as they feel they can. 

Not sure I want to encourage too hard. It could be a severe performance
penalty. And I agree that SHOULD is far too strong.

>+ I don't care deeply about the issue, and could live with any wording
>that permits full checking but doesn't require it. 

-- 
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