[pcap-ng-format] [OPSAWG] New Version Notification for draft-tuexen-opsawg-pcapng-02.txt

[Carsten Bormann]

(Keeping CC list, so I’ll probably reach people and not lists.)

> On 2020-09-28, at 22:41, Guy Harris <gharris at sonic.net> wrote:
> 
> There are tools to convert Markdown to v2 or v3 RFC XML:
> 
> 	https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/tools/

This is a list of very, very different tools.  Some of these are useful for a “conversion” (as a one-time effort), some are meant to be used in a publishing pipeline where people rarely see the “object file” that happens to be in XML (e.g., mmark and kramdown-rfc).

> so:
> 
> 	1) is it easier to edit Markdown or RFC XML?

I wrote kramdown-rfc a decade ago when I had two days to write six drafts.

I gambled that spending one day on the tool and one day on writing markdown would be quicker than spending two days on writing XML.  

I won.

This was meant as a personal tool to get work done (and, boy, did it speed up my work), but it has found some other users; approximately 20 % of all Internet-Drafts are currently being written in kramdown-rfc (approximately 2 % use mmark).

> 	2) is Markdown rich enough to do everything we want to do?

No.  So there are some additions.

> For 2), I note that
> 
> 	https://github.com/pcapng/pcapng/blob/master/draft-tuexen-opsawg-pcapng.md
> 
> has a bunch of stuff that GitHub isn't treating as markup, such as the stuff prior to the "Introduction" heading, and the tags such as "{::boilerplate bcp14}".  Is that an extension of Markdown not supported by GitHub's Markdown renderer but supported by some Markdown-to-RFC XML converter,

Yes.

(I have since sent Michael an automatically upconverted markdown version of the XML, BTW.)

> In addition, the XML version at
> 
> 	https://github.com/pcapng/pcapng/blob/master/reference-draft-tuexen-opsawg-pcapng.xml
> 
> has some additional Decryption Secrets Block secret formats.  Those have data formats that *themselves* call for figures, and I'd been trying, at one point, to determine how to do that in RFC XML v2 format - it might require v3 format.  Can that be handled with Markdown?

You can always fall back to XML inside the markdown, but that is rarely needed.

As an example for a slightly automated form of writing, RFC 7400 was written in markdown, with a significant part of the text generated automatically from a Makefile; this text is then included using the {::include …} construct of kramdown-rfc.

Some resources:
http://rfc.space
http://slides.rfc.space
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rfc-markdown

Grüße, Carsten