Subject: [Terminology] Please don't shoot the messenger

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2021 08:56:06 +1300

Hi,

Somebody suggested it would be easy to write a tool to check drafts
and RFCs for questionable terminology. I'm not so sure it's easy
to write a *good* tool, but see https://github.com/becarpenter/bowdler
(start with the README of course).

Please read on, and/or play with this, but do note that:
(a) this was done as a proof of concept, so the code is not beautiful;
(b) I'm not suggesting that the IETF necessarily needs a tool for
this, or that it needs to be a home-brew tool.

Sample output for RFC 1:

Generated at 2021-02-22 17:39:32 UTC+1300
Vocabulary 'C:/brian/docs/IETF stuff/rudewords.txt' has 30 entries.
Target 'C:/brian/docs/IETF stuff/rfc/rfc1.txt' has 619 lines.
Line 217 contains: he
Line 352 contains: he

Sample output for RFC 2474:

Generated at 2021-02-25 17:20:33 UTC+1300
Vocabulary 'C:/brian/docs/IETF stuff/rudewords.txt' has 30 entries & 4 exempt phrases
Target 'C:/brian/docs/IETF stuff/rfc/rfc2474.txt' has 1123 lines.
Line 876 contains: man in the middle

Sample output for RFC 8989:

Generated at 2021-02-22 18:14:34 UTC+1300
Vocabulary 'C:/brian/docs/IETF stuff/rudewords.txt' has 30 entries.
Target 'C:/brian/docs/IETF stuff/rfc/rfc8989.html' has 1889 lines.
No words from vocabulary found

Clearly we have made progress over the years.

One problem that my code doesn't solve is skipping over the page footers and headers in RFCs and I-Ds. Since idnits already has to solve that problem, and I assume we'd want any checking tool to be incorporated in idnits, I set that aside.

BTW, I don't exclude that codespell, which Mallory mentioned, might be useful, but it is aimed at a different problem space.

Regards
   Brian Carpenter