Subject: Additional Key words to Indicate Requirement Levels

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:41:33 -0800

Greetings again. A few Internet Drafts are starting to adopt the 
MUST- / SHOULD+ / SHOULD- terminology from RFC 4307. So that people 
can point to stand-alone definitions, I created a small draft. From 
the announcement:

==========

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : Additional Key words to Indicate Requirement Levels
	Author(s)       : P. Hoffman
	Filename        : draft-hoffman-additional-key-words-00.txt
	Pages           : 5
	Date            : 2008-01-15

Some document authors want to express requirement levels using the
traditional definitions of "MUST" and "SHOULD" from RFC 2119, but
also want to express that there is an expectation that later versions
of the document may change those requirements.  For example, they may
want to express "this SHOULD be implemented now, but we expect that
this will become a MUST requirement in a future update to this
standard".

This document defines three new keywords, "MUST-", "SHOULD+", and
"SHOULD-" to facilitate such definitions.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-hoffman-additional-key-words-00.txt

==========

Comments are welcome.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:38:33 -0800

>can point to stand-alone definitions, I created a small draft. From 

These new requirement levels might serve as a crystal ball as to the 
direction the specifications are expected to follow.  That might be 
perceived by some as a valid reason whether to implement a 
recommendation or not.

In the context of RFC 4307, these terms make sense.  If the terms 
were generalized, they might be used to impose a particular 
recommendation without any elaboration from the author.

Regards,
-sm