Subject: [Idr] Barry Leiba's Yes on draft-ietf-idr-rfc8203bis-07: (with COMMENT)

From: Barry Leiba via Datatracker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Oct 2020 20:38:46 -0700

Barry Leiba has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-idr-rfc8203bis-07: Yes

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COMMENT:
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It would help if the document said, right up in the Introduction, that the
purpose of this is to increase the valid length of the Shutdown Communication
to 255 octets, up from 128, because 128 turned out not to be enough for
translation of reasonable strings into some languages, such as Russian.  Such a
statement might have made it clearer to the IESG, and perhaps to other
reviewers, and will likely help other readers understand why this update is
being made.

To respond to Alissa's comment about what we might do to avoid this in future
is that it's correct that an Internationalization review probably would not
have picked up that 128 octets might not be enough for, say, Russian
translation of common messages.  I guess we could try doing sample translations
before settling on maximum field lengths.  I suspect that the effort is likely
not worth it, given how infrequently this has turned out to be a problem so
far.  I don't see other I18N issues with this document.

I have one text suggestion, as this point has been confusing to people in the
past: OLD
      Note that when the Shutdown Communication contains multibyte
      characters, the number of characters will be less than the length
      value.
NEW
      Note that UTF-8 often encodes a single Unicode character as
      multiple octets. When the Shutdown Communication contains
      such multibyte characters, the length value (in UTF-8 octets) will
      be greater than the number of Unicode characters.
END