idnits 3.0.0

Convert text-format RFCs and Internet-Drafts to .xml format

idnits

The idnits program inspects IETF Internet-Draft documents for a variety of conditions that should be adjusted to bring the document into line with policies from the IETF, the IETF Trust, and the RFC Editor.

The determination of which issues are to be repored is based on:

• Requirements in https://www.ietf.org/id-info/1id-guidelines.txt

• Requirements in https://www.ietf.org/id-info/checklist

• Additional requirements captured from ADs and authors over time

• Requirements in https://iaoc.ietf.org/documents/idnits-SOW-00.pdf

Changelog

Version 3.0.0 (31 Dec 2018)

This introduces a re-implementation of the idnits tool in Python.

The original idnits tool (versions 1.x and 2.x) grew from a 10-line awk script to more than 3000 lines of mixed bash and awk code during a period of 17 years, and was over-ripe for re-implementation. The new python code is organised so as to make it easy to add new checks and features, without becoming unwieldy.

The re-implementation also introduces the ability to run idnits on IETF draft and RFC source files in XML format, and adds new checks that looks for problems with the XML source in particular.

This release focuses on the ability to run idnits checks on XML source, while still containing the TXT format checks. Additional checks related to both XML and TXT format input will be added in coming releases.