Subject: Re: [Ltru] AD review of draft-ietf-ltru-4646bis-21bis.txt

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 14:14:22 -0600

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> Technically, only Michael is the Registry Reviewer.  Doug's role is 
> that of Imperial Chancellor.  :-)

Cool!  I'll have business cards printed at once.

>> Unless I am confused, I think this SHOULD NOT contradicts MUST NOT in 
>> section 2.2.4.
>
> I agree: 3.4 rule 16 should be MUST NOT.

Please make whatever changes are deemed necessary to straighten out the 
RFC 2119 issues.  In particular, I've always felt that the WG insisted 
on capitalized MAYs where the words refer to that which might be, not to 
optional protocol features.

>> I think if File-Date record present in the registry has a later date 
>> than the record being inserted or modified, then IANA should use the 
>> date of update (which I assume would be after the record 
>> modification/addition date). This way any change to the IANA registry 
>> can be detected.
>
> This is a "shouldn't happen" situation, where at the time a 
> modification is made, the File-Date is later than the current date.

It just did happen, and happens regularly.  We (Michael) submitted the 
latest batch of changes to IANA on April 3, with dates of 2009-04-03 as 
appropriate.  In particular, the script subtag 'Zinh' was submitted with 
an Added date of 2009-04-03.  But IANA did not add these to the Registry 
until April 7, and so they applied File-Date: 2009-04-07 to the entire 
Registry while keeping the Added: 2009-04-03 date for 'Zinh'.

> But if it does happen, we never want to set the File-Date of the new 
> version to be earlier than the File-Date of the version being 
> superseded.  That would cause any entity trying to decide which of two 
> versions to use to get the wrong answer.

Correct, and that is why I for one have never worried much about the 
mismatch described above.

> A great deal of the complexity of BCP 47, in any version, reflects 
> experience with the mistakes made over the years by IANA, the various 
> RAs and MAs, and ietf-languages.

+1 emphatically.  All of us would have loved to be able to make this 
simpler and less rigid, as it was in RFC 1766 and 3066.

> This is a political compromise between those who like extlangs and 
> those who don't, both of whom were very vehement in the WG.  We allow 
> both and we don't insist that one MUST be used.  It's better not to 
> upset the applecart here.

+1

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ