From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 26 2002 - 06:24:14 CDT
In <8VY2TD6ZcDB@3247.org> list-ietf-wg-apps-usefor@faerber.muc.de (Claus Färber) writes:
>Please explain why the requirements above are more important than these:
>. Leagacy news transport systems must be able to handle the newsgroups.
They do.
>. Leagacy software accompanying news transport systems (e.g. scripts
> that create newsgroups autmatically, etc.) must be able to handle
> the newsgroups.
That would be useful, but is not essential. Observe that many servers were
able to create dk.test.utf8-aeå with their standard scripts (though most,
quite rightly, warned their administrators first).
>. Posting to moderated groups must work even if the NNTP server has not
> been updated and uses a per-hierarchy configuration for moderation
> addresses.
There is no way that can work, nor should it be expected to. Any server
that chooses to accept a moderated Non-ASCII group onto its active list
must know how to encode it for moderator.isc.org.
>. Leagacy news user agents must be able to read the newsgroups.
That is NOT a requirement (out draft explicitly says so).
>. Leagacy news user agents must be able to post to the newsgroup.
That is NOT a requirement (out draft explicitly says so).
>. Leagacy news user agents must not create broken Newsgroup headers
> (even if their programmers were just plain stupid).
If they are already written so as not to create broken Newsgroup-headers
according to the present standard, they will not be able to create the new
ones either.
>. The same files must be editable with both UTF-8 and leagacy editors
> and it must be guaranteed that the Unicode normalization form will not
> be changed and that no 8bit character will be lost.
a) That is NOT a requirement.
b) It is.
>. Cut-and-pasting newsgroup names must work with the same guarantee.
That is really an operating system problem. I was presently surprised to
find that my Solaris 7, when in a UTF-8 locale, knew how to do it.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk 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