RE: opsec and 2119 keywords

["Harrington, David" <dbh@enterasys.com>]

Hi,

I have a concern about keeping the keywords in. Either MUST means MUST
or it doesn't. RFC2119 identifies what MUST means in an IETF standard
(and in a BCP, I believe). 

Using MUST in a different sense in an informational document, especially
one that claims to espouse best current practice or is expected to
espouse best current practice in the future, introduces ambiguity - is
this necessary for interoperability or not?

I think it would simply be WCP - worst current practice - to
deliberately introduce ambiguity into these guidelines. 

I work in the Office of the CTO for Enterasys, and part of my job is to
educate engineers and others and to convince them they should develop
products that comply with standards requirements. If you develop a
document that makes "compliance" to this sort-of-best current practice
ambiguous, it makes it harder to sell compliance in the long run. It
will be much easier for me to maintain the need to comply to real
standards and BCPs by telling my engineers that YOUR "compliance"
language really doesn't count, which signals to the engineers that your
document can effectively be ignored. I think that is counter-productive.

Either use MUST/SHOULD/etc. as would be required for a BCP compliant to
RFC2119, or don't use them in your document, or qualify them in your
document to indicate what they REALLY mean in your context. I prefer
that you make them standards-compatible or don't use them at all.

dbh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: George Jones [mailto:gmj@pobox.com] 
> Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 9:53 AM
> To: black_david@emc.com
> Cc: opsec@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: opsec and 2119 keywords
> 
> Dave, in the opsec BoF you (I think) said:
> 
> [18:42:46] <smb> db: with suitable disclaimers it's okay to use RFC
> 2119.
> [18:42:55] <smb> db: with a little more soak time this could be a BCP
> [18:43:17] <smb> db: on RFC 2119, add some words to get an
> informational out, and then remove them when it goes BCP
> 
> Could you elaborate, esp. since the consensus of the BoF seemed
> to be to take it INFO now.   My tendancy will be to leave the
> keywords mostly as-is unless there is a strong argument...or
> IESG input to change.   Thoughts ?
> 
> Thanks,
> ---George Jones
> 
> 
> 
>