From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 14 2001 - 15:53:49 CDT
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>> I think you'd need some evidence that people actually use it for useful
>> things that would be cool to support, and all the discussion in the
>> world is unlikely to provide that evidence. I feel the same way about
>> a lot of the things people propose. That's why we need to get the base
>> draft out so that we have a working extension mechanism,
> Actually, we have not defined an extension mechanism. OTOH, I don't think
> we actually need one in the way that NNTP does.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. Andrew and I were talking about the =
flag in active, and the NNTP group aliasing mechanism, both of which are
technically off-topic in this working group as they're NNTP issues, not
article format issues. The extension mechanism to which I was referring
was the NNTP one.
> OTOH, although we may have been talking about "experimental" extensions,
> please be aware that, it they are envisaged as candidates for
> standardisation later on, then they have to be published as "standards
> track" RFCs because, according to the rules, you cannot move an
> "experimental protocol" RFC onto the standards track without first
> republishing it as a "proposed standard" RFC (even if it has not
> changed).
Yes, that's fine. I have no problem with publishing things as
experimental and then later republishing them. Once the process gets
unstuck, I expect that to take much less time than the current
deliberations have taken.
> Yes, but 'mvgrpoup' is not the sort of thing you can "use or not
> depending on whether it's available".
Sure it is. Send a mvgroup and then send an rmgroup and newgroup. This
is even a case where the broken historical behavior of some servers of
sending all unknown control messages to the news admin would work to its
*advantage*.
> In any case, suppose we were to issue such an extension a few months
> after our present draft is published; would we write into that extension
> anything different from what we would write now? Will we understand the
> issue any better by then?
I personally think it would be useful to standardize group aliasing before
tackling the problem of moving groups, since that would make things easier
for reader agents to follow the move. Group aliasing will become much
clearer after the NNTP base draft is published.
> Or are you saying any such extension must wait until you are ready to
> tidy up the 'ugly' parts of INN that are currently making it difficult?
No, any one implementation is irrelevant to when something should be
published.
I'm saying that I think we're wasting time discussing this right now
because it's not basic functionality and it's not fully understood. It
therefore doesn't belong in the base article standard in my opinion, which
is already several years late and therefore ideally shouldn't be held up
by debate about new features.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>