Re: Last Call: draft-ietf-lemonade-rfc2192bis (IMAP URL Scheme) to Proposed Standard

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On Mon Jun 18 08:30:00 2007, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> 	If you do believe the ABNF needs special licensing in
> this case, I am sorry to say that your remedy is not sufficient. This
> document imports ABNF from other documents (from RFC 3986,
> to take one important example).  Those documents do not have
> anything like what you suggest.


I disagree, I think they do have what Simon's suggesting. But then, I think RFC2192bis does, as well.


True, but I don't believe that is relevant to the document under
discussion.


I think it's basically relevant - I agree that it may be possible to have a generic ABNF parser which is "preloaded" with sufficient knowledge to avoid the need for the several ABNF references in this document, but the fact remains that there's a lot more ABNF referenced in than there is in the document itself - but that, of course, assumes that there's a problem here.

The conclusion remains that if the ABNF in this particular document is
made available under a more liberal license, it will make
implementations of this particular document easier and more reliable.
That should be in the interest of the IETF.

I readily agree that we should have ABNF treated as code which may be incorporated directly or indirectly into implementations under a liberal license, and I think you're quite right to raise this issue.

I disagree that this document is the place to start what I suspect would be a fairly lengthy process.

RFC4234bis, on the other hand, could reasonably start to address this from the ground up, and I feel that's the place to direct your energies.

However...

I'd personally expect that ABNF was treated as "executable code or code fragments" under BCP78, Section 3.3(a)E, much like a MIB, and hence your concerns would seem misplaced. Of course, clarifying this would be welcome, but the text within BCP78 is not referenced explicitly nor copied into recent MIB RFCs, and nor is that text limited to MIBs - MIBs are merely one example given - so I would be surprised if this weren't intended to be the case for ABNF as well.

Relatively recent comments I've seen have suggested to me that at least some other RFC authors believe that the ABNF can be extracted and used in the process of implementing a parser, for example http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/imap-protocol/2006-March/000136.html (Mark Crispin, referring to ABNF from RFC3501, "[...] you should use one of the excellent syntax generators that read ABNF.")

So unless I'm completely misreading what BCP78 says - and in that case I'm not the only one - I think we're covered anyway.

Dave.
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