Comments on -file-list-00

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings again. I'm quite happy with all of the drafts Chris put up
earlier this week. I hope from the resounding silence that others are also
happy. :-)

I would like to see one change to the -file-list draft, however. Right now,
you can mix and match numbers and names in the base, listversion, and type
portions. Thus, you could have:
base.12.3.1
base.12.current.1
1.12.0.ldap

This is very messy. Instead, I propose that the alphabetic names always be
used in every part, except when numbers are substituted everywhere to make
an OID. The BNF would change to only include the alphabetic names, and we
would add something like:

The name may also be specified as an OID. In this case, "base" would become
the full OID base for the repository, a listversion of "current" would
become "0", and the type would be substituted according to the following
table:...

This would make storage on the server much easier, and retrieval would be
much more definitive: either use the words only, or use the full OID.

Further, I would like to get rid of "base" for the names. Thus, a name
would be "12.3.ldap" or "12.current.ldap". When they were retrieving by
OID, they would prepend the base to the name. It is perfectly reasonable to
force the server to allow listing requests by full OID and by just
sequence.listversion.type numbers.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium