Hi Andrew, On 2011-02-24 16:28 Andrew Sullivan said: > On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 10:18:10AM -0500, Worley, Dale R (Dale) wrote: >> >> I would expect that the idnits rules change only very slowly. What is the real story on that? > > They seem to change more quickly than people realise. Also, of > course, a whole bunch of changes can go by between a given > contributor's last I-D, and a current one. Not all the changes are > intentional; they're often pretty clearly based on heuristics that as > often as not look to me like they're derived from what certain tools > do. So then if someone submits something that doesn't do exactly what > those tools do, they get a false failure. > > Note that none of this is to attack the tools developers. I've ranted > before about the absurdity of checking the formatting of early drafts > for perfection, so I won't bother again. Still, I feel that the characterization above is less than spot-on. Idnits in submission-checking mode only returns errors for a few selected things out of the myriad of things it is able to check, and those things are clearly required by http://www.ietf.org/id-info/1id-guidelines.txt . Only errors will prevent an automatic draft submission from going through; ignore the warnings and comments to your heart's content for that purpose. If you have examples of drafts which conform to the submission requirements of 1id-guidelines.txt, but don't pass the submission check mode of idnits, *please* tell me about them so I can fix things. The ratio of gripes against idnits to actual bug reports is getting to be a bit annoying; and I'd like to suggest that people either submit bug reports, or direct the complaints against the requirements of 1id-guidelines.txt rather than against the tool which checks the requirements if the problem is that the requirements are too strict. Henrik _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf