Subject: #1047 Path field delimiters and syntax - status

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 10:38:44 -0700 (PDT)

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>- Permit : in "diagnostics", not in "identities", and add some appropriate 
>note with warnings on what will happen to DEAD:BEEF:CAFE

>Does this make sense?

No. ':' is even less needed if the entry is only a "diagnostic", whatever
that is supposed to be. 

Proposal already on table to deal with IPv6 literals in path identities
and the use of colons. There is even less reason not to use it since you
want to limit their existance to "diagnostics".

And it matches the last text you produced for ABNF for path identities.

"We know this bad thing can happen if you do this. Instead of providing a
safe way to do it, we'll let you do the bad thing anyway." Good standard.

---

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 09:08:19 -0700 (PDT)

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>There is a standard notation for writing both IPv4- and IPv6-addresses,
>and the world will not thank us for not using them

There is a standard for what abuse reporting address must be valid, but
you felt we could change that. There is a standard for the syntax of a
message id, but we feel we can change that.

We have a known incompatibility with a specific way of representing an 
IPv6 address (IPv4 is irrelevant to this discussion). Like I said, there 
is no immutable rule that says we must do it the same way. I won't waste 
my time looking it up, but I expect that the "standard" in question does 
not use the RFC2119 mandates that would make the use anything more than a 
suggestion.

Specifically, if the use of IPv6 literals is limited to "diagnostic" 
purposes (which I've not yet seen well defined) then the only people 
entering them are a few admins who are doing something special in the 
first place. "The world" isn't involved in this, so pretending that this 
would be some hardship for "the world" is just more flummery.

And even if a site chooses to use its IPv6 address, then the amount of 
typing involved is 32 characters, one time, and only the feed sites are 
involved.

>So it is a choice of requiring the world to use a non-standard IPv6 
>notation 

Nonsense. Most of the world will never see, nor care, what appears in the 
path header. They will never have to "use" it. 

>or of accepting the small risk that some sites
>might try to use barewords such as "dead" and "beef", which old
>implementations might do strange things with.

We can either solve the problem permanently or we can waste more time 
arguing about what is "small risk" and why we should have to accept any 
risk at all. I see that you fall into the "waste more time arguing about 
it" camp.