From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Oct 19 2000 - 05:55:07 CDT
In <Pine.LNX.4.10.10010180950200.18252-100000@spock.peak.org> John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> writes:
Yes, John is quite right down to here (in fact, he argues so persuasively
that someone might actually believe him :-) ).
>I learned quite a bit about "interoperability" from that discussion.
>Interoperability is not about what makes things break or allows them to
>work, it is about anything that makes life convenient for anyone at some
>time in their life. Having an invalid From header in news doesn't break
>news in any way, it just makes it less convenient for someone to contact
>the poster in email. Not one person could say that "news breaks with
>invalid From: headers because...", all they could say was "I can't press
>one button and send email...".
But no. I think lack of "interoperability" means something that causes
some feature of a protocol not to work at all (of which causing actual
damage to the system is an extreme case). So something that upsets a human
because he does not receive a communication at all affects interoperability,
but not something that merely causes him some inconvenience.
So that is why I am happy with "A followup agent MUST NOT (unless its user
explicitly overrides it) email a copy of the followup article to the
author of the original article if ..." because the whole purpose of the
MCT part of the protocol is to prevent that.
But it is also why I would be most UNhappy about using MUST NOT in the
default case (absence of the MCT header) because no protocol is broken in
that case (and neither is existing practice). I don't think the IETF would
like it either, if they were to spot it.
>If people are going to claim "interoperability" for things that don't
>cause anything to break, well, damn it, I'm going to use the same argument
>to make my life easier, too. If being able to send email to a poster is
>"interoperability" for news systems, then being able to throw away an
>errant news message generated by rude people who think they have to send
>me an email copy of their messages is just as much an interoperability
>issue. So there. If sending it to me is interoperability, throwing it away
>automatically is, too.
I think throwing away an errant news message WOULD break interoperability,
were it not for the fact that we have specifically said that sites may do
it for reasons of local policy.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5