On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 12:35:46AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > aj, who'd rather relying on things that are objectively verifiable, rather > than oracles like the policy editor or the release manager
The RFC usages of SHOULD and MUST have spread far beyond the RFCs, they are popular among groups that write standards and protocol descriptions. I've seen standards from widely different sources, and if they define "should" and "must" as technical terms, they always refer to the RFC usage or define something similar. (They then tend to go ahead and use them wrong, but still.) Defining "should" and "must" to something different is objectively bad style, because it breaks established conventions in an unexpected way. It's a bit like writing C code that uses "i" as a random pointer and "p" as a loop index. If you're coding for the IOCCC you can even keep writing p[i] :-) You can expect people to go read the intro that defines should and must, when they read parts of policy in isolation, but I think you will be disappointed in that expectation. Keeping the difference in mind also uses up valuable neurons that could be used to think up better ways to write maintainer scripts. Richard Braakman
