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ietf-tools / idnits

Library / CLI to inspect Internet-Draft documents for a variety of conditions to conform with IETF policies.
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Idnits gives opposite suggestions #21

Closed ju7ien closed 2 years ago

ju7ien commented 2 years ago

Describe the issue

A document I'm shepherding used to include in the abstract a phrase like "This document updates [RFCXXXX]" and Idnits requested to get rid of references there. The editors did the change, but now Idnits complaints (as a comment) that, considering the update field in the header, "the abstract doesn't seem to mention this, which it should". To me, that I-D is fine to progress like this, but I'm not comfortable with that behavior of Idnits.

Code of Conduct

rjsparks commented 2 years ago

References are not allowed in abstracts of RFCs at all, so removing the references was the right thing to do. The heuristics the current implementation of idnits uses to detect things like mentioning the updates can sometimes mis-guess. The issue here would be more useful if you provided a link to the draft where the heuristics missed.

In any case, we are working towards a replacement for idnits that will behave differently.

ju7ien commented 2 years ago

Hi Robert.
Thanks for the feedback. The analysis that triggered my comment is here: https://author-tools.ietf.org/api/idnits?url=https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-pce-local-protection-enforcement-07.txt

In any case, we are working towards a replacement for idnits that will behave differently.

I saw that when filling in the shepherd write-up. If my comment is addressed as part of the rewriting, there's no reason to spend time tweaking the legacy implementation.

rjsparks commented 2 years ago

Ah - I see - the IESG does want the Abstract to call out the Updates/Obsoletes information, but not as references. When the document gets that far, they will ask for a sentence that looks like "This document updates RFC5540." But note that the RFC5540 string in the sentence is not a reference.

ju7ien commented 2 years ago

OK, that explains! So it isn't really a bug. I hope the future releases of Idnits will make that clearer, e.g. add "without square brackets" in the output.
Thank you, Robert!