Re: SHOULD vs MUST (was Re: Review of draft-ietf-geopriv-http-location-delivery-07)

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



I think I'm essentially agreeing with Eric Rescorla here, but perhaps phrasing it differently may help.

On Sat Jun 21 14:31:03 2008, Lawrence Conroy wrote:
I had read 2119 to mean that a MUST was unconditional
- do this or be non-complaint.

That's a reasonable assessment, given RFC 2119.


Do you believe that MUST can have an "unless" clause?

I think that any MUST X unless Y can essentially be rephrased as one of "MUST (X or Y)", or "MUST (X or Y); SHOULD X". Lacking context on geopriv, it sounds like one of these (and it doesn't matter which).


Doesn't this mean that any SHOULD with an explicit "unless" will
need to be changed into a MUST - could you expand on this, please?

Again, I lack context here, but if the intent is as above, then they may do.

A SHOULD X unless Y essentially means "SHOULD (X or Y)" - as Eric says, this is probably not what the intent is, although in the case of TLS authentication it might be a reasonable course of action. I have to admit that if I read a "SHOULD X unless Y", given the usual English meaning, I'd read it as the same as "MUST X unless Y", but Eric's quite correct in pointing out the difference.

A final point is that actually phrasing it as "MUST X or Y" is problematic since English lacks the possibility of parenthesis for precendence - hence a stronger binding, such as MUST X unless Y, is preferable.

Dave.
--
Dave Cridland - mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx - xmpp:dwd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 - acap://acap.dave.cridland.net/byowner/user/dwd/bookmarks/
 - http://dave.cridland.net/
Infotrope Polymer - ACAP, IMAP, ESMTP, and Lemonade
_______________________________________________
IETF mailing list
IETF@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

[Index of Archives]     [IETF Annoucements]     [IETF]     [IP Storage]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux SCTP]     [Linux Newbies]     [Fedora Users]