Registry fixed (was: Re: Records Missing Required Field: jkp, nph, tvt)

[Doug Ewell]

[IANA: see last paragraph.]

"Gordon P. Hemsley" <gphemsley at gmail dot com> wrote:

> However, as far as I can tell, a violation of the field requirements
> is not a violation of the ABNF. It is merely a violation of the prose
> of the spec. So it would be acceptable to invalidate the individual
> record on such a violation, but not the entire Registry.

Well, I don't agree. IMO, when we are talking about statements like
"Each record MUST contain at least one of each of the following fields,"
the prose of the spec carries as much weight as the ABNF. I'd appreciate
the original authors weighing in on this.

> Using this interpretation, the 2012-08-26 Registry was invalid and
> could have been corrected without changing the date. Since the syntax
> correction was instead given a new date version (2012-08-27), the
> second update to fix the record violations was itself also a violation
> of the spec.

(I hasten to add that none of the blame for this violation belongs to
IANA. They were informed of errors, and they fixed them promptly.)

> If we feel this is important enough (and perhaps we should, to avoid
> setting a precedent), we could fix all this simply by changing the
> Registry version to 2012-08-28 without making any other changes. Then,
> both versions of the 2012-08-27 Registry would be out of date, and we
> can retroactively consider the percent-sign update as version
> 2012-08-27 and the Added update as 2012-08-28.
>
> Thoughts?

I can check with IANA about re-releasing the current Registry with a new
date. I suspect those of us on this list are among the few who
downloaded the buggy 08-27 copy before it was replaced by the corrected
08-27 copy. But it's possible there are some tools that picked up the
buggy one, and won't now pick up the new one because the date hasn't
changed. Given more spare time, I probably would have written such a
tool myself.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­