Subject: Angels, pins, 2142 and 2119

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 12:53:56 +0200

I have reviewed the thread entitled "New USEPRO path-identity text (Hello, 
Chair?)".

In my opinion, most of the arguments presented in the thread bear about as 
much resembleance to useful input on this group's output as a discussion on 
the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

Remember:

- RFC 2142 is, largely, a failed standard. Most sites do not claim 
conformance to it now, most sites won't claim conformance to it in the 
future.

- RFC 2119 is a guideline, and was written in English, not mathematical 
language. And not very precise English at that. Trying to do word-by-word 
exegesis on the text is not just unprofitable, it's downright silly. We 
need to take a pragmatic approach to usage of the "keywords", and use them 
in ways that will be useful as a guidance to implementors.

- Protocol standards specify requirements for implementations. The way an 
implementation complies is not "are all possible configurations 
standards-compliant?", it is "can the system be configured to be 
standards-compliant?".
Most systems behave in non-compliant ways part of the time, and protocol 
standards have no business trying to require that they don't. That's one 
reason why Best Current Practices (the real ones) are distinct from 
protocol documents.

Please choose a more constructive style of debate in the future; battering 
each other with "the only possible way to read this paragraph is FOO, 
therefore you can/cannot recommend BAR" is Just Not Helpful.

Anyway, most of the real arguments in that thread are now completely moot, 
given that the group has consensus to not mandate anything about email 
addresses in the USEPRO document.

                              Harald