On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Tony Hansen <tony@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On 6/28/2013 4:53 AM, Dearlove, Christopher (UK) wrote: >> I'd actually tried the authors, but no reply yet (only a few days). .... >> >> For me, a thanks to Tony Hansen, who did the extraction for me. (That makes me feel a little guilty, why should he do my work I could have done?) But the point of posting on this list was to say that the code should be available so that each person wanting that code doesn't have to do that again. > > Hmmm, as one of the authors of RFC6234, I'm not sure how to respond to > that, other than to say, You're welcome. :-) (And no, you didn't get the > files extracted from the RFC, but instead got the files as used to > generate the RFC.) > >> I also tried the RFC Editor thinking they might have e.g. XML from which extraction might have been easier, but also no response yet. And I had found several libraries, but not the RFC code. ... >> But the broader point is that if it's worth the IETF publishing the >> code as an RFC, it's worth making the code available straightforwardly. > > I've suggested on a couple occasions to the RFC Editor that, when an RFC > provides source code, they should allow rfcXXXX.tar or rfcXXXX.tgz to be > provided as well. > > There's only a handful of RFCs that do provide source code, for whatever > reason, so this should not be an onerous additional feature. > > I've CC'd the RFC Interest mailing list, where this would be more > properly discussed. This came to my mind while reading: why not embedding the archive in the text with some special "line header" that makes automatic extraction possible? For example, this could be a first rough draft of the procedure 1. Create an archive of the source files with ar. This command has the characteristic that if the files are text files, also the archive is pure text 2. Embed the archive in the RFC by adding at the beginning of each line a '!' (or another marker). Lines too long for an RFC can be split and the marker changed to (say) '?' In order to extract the archive should suffice to process it with an awk script, piped to ar to extract the files (and if you have Windows, you install cygwin :-). With this approach the source code would also remain human-readable in the RFC text. The only drawback is the length of the resulting RFC if the embedded code is very large. Riccardo Bernardini > > Tony Hansen > > > >