RE: opsec and 2119 keywords

[Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz@cmu.edu>]

On Wednesday, March 10, 2004 04:35:50 -0800 George Jones <gmj@pobox.com> 
wrote:

> > I also agree with Pekka's view on whether to use the upper case
> > RFC 2119 terms:
>
> I think I'm missing something else here WRT case.  2119 does not speak
> directly to case (at least not lower case).  Is there a later or
> unwritten convention that I'm missing ?

Apparently.  I suspect some of us thought this was written down, but the 
convention is that RFC2119 requirements keywords always appear in 
UPPERCASE, as they do in that document.  The meaning of these words when 
not in uppercase is ambiguous -- some people will interpret them as 
requirements, while others will treat them as plain prose or even go so far 
as to think, "It's not uppercase, so it's not really a requirement, and I 
don't have to do it".  This is why I prefer in documents using RFC2119 
requirements language to avoid the use of the terms "must", "should", 
"may", "required", "recommended", and "optional" except as requirements 
keywords.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
  Sr. Research Systems Programmer
  School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
  Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA