Subject: [Pce] Your help with an errata report on RBNF in RFC 5557

From: "Adrian Farrel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 11:04:26 +0100

Some time back Cyril raised an Errata Report against RFC 5557
http://www.rfc-editor.org/errata_search.php?eid=3672

The essence of his report is that message definitions in RFCs should include all
elements of RBNF from the messages as defined in previous RFCs.

Discussion of this point led to a debate about whether the RBNF is normative and
should be "compilable". Some hold the view that being conservative in what you
send and liberal in what you receive could only make this text normative for
building messages not parsing them. Others noted that, as with RSVP, the object
ordering is advisory not mandatory except as where noted explicitly in the text.

It is also worth noting that as various documents are developed in parallel,
getting the RBNF right in the RFCs might require last-minute edits in Auth48
which is undesirable for a host of reasons. Others observed that there is no
expectation that authors will read RFC in numeric order and that the RBNF for a
new feature in PCEP applies to how that feature is added.

All this led to http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cmfg-pce-pcep-grammar/
which is an experiment to determine whether it is possible to derive an
aggregated RBNF description for all PCEP messages. This might (if successful) go
on to form a type of message registry to act as a stable reference point.

With all this in mind, I propose to reject the current report.

Does anyone object.

Thanks,
Adrian