From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Mon Feb 25 2002 - 15:16:13 CST
Clive D W Feather <clive@demon.net> writes:
> Charles Lindsey said:
>> (but with a discouraging NOTE) and a SHOULD NOT for changing it if it
>> is already there.
> SHOULD NOT change any header (apart from the explicitly permitted ones),
> I take it ?
I think that's a reasonable rule for Usenet at large, in part because of
the whole mess of suck/rpost feeds and the ways in which header munging
can mess those up, but I'm rather uncomfortable with that rule in the
context of private hierarchies (which are *also* supposed to be served by
this standard).
What if you're using Usenet articles for a request tracking system of some
kind and want to add additional status headers to the message? Sure, you
can just say that you're not going to follow the Usenet article format,
but it seems a shame to have that make software only conditionally
compliant just because it's configured for a private hierarchy.
Hm. Although, I guess that isn't that big of a deal; it does make a
degree of sense to have private hierarchy software be only conditionally
compliant with standards intended primarily for Usenet at large.
I guess it depends a lot on what medium and set of users you see our
standard as addressing.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>