Subject: [Sip] Essential corrections

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:17:55 -0400

I would like to praise the current proposal, viz., providing each
change in two forms:  one as a textual difference to the relevant RFC
and the other as a prose narrative of the new behavior.  (There 
should also be discussion of what the difference is and what the
motivation is, but I'm not addressing that here.)  And both
descriptions should be *normative*.

The reason is that it makes the revision process much more robust
against error -- though it's unfortunately easy to make errors in
either diff form or in narrative form, it is difficult to make the
*same* error in both forms.  Contradictions between the two forms show
that an error has been made in the error correction.  (Yuck.)

This is similar to putting comments in code -- one of the major tools
for debugging code is to notice that the comments and the code do not
match.

(Designating one or the other as the sole normative form would make
the normative meaning of the correction unambiguous if there was a
contradiction, but it would not raise the probability that the
normative meaning was correct or was what was intended.  Similarly,
when a comment does not match code, either one might be wrong.)

Dale

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