From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Thu Feb 28 2002 - 13:08:52 CST
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu):
>John, please don't paraphrase what I write. You almost never get it
>correct, so it ends up just being confusing.
>Thanks.
Thanks so much for pointing out where my paraphrase was wrong, or how the
argument I made based on it was wrong. Or how the argument I made based on
a direct quote was flawed.
Let's go to the tape. You wrote:
>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.
Wow, you're right, I really screwed up my summary. You said "request
tracking system" and I said "bug tracking system". I said "need to have
updated status information inserted" and you said "want to add additional
status headers". Wow, that really changed the entire essence of the
discussion at a very basic, fundamental level. Of course, it is patently
clear now that your "request tracking system" really is news and the news
standard must be written to allow it to be implemented in news, without
even the slightest stigma that it might be "conditionally compliant" with
the standard for an application it really isn't in the first place.
And then you wrote:
>A better example would be
>an injector that automatically added a tracking number to the subject
>line, perhaps because it's also gating messages into mail and can't assume
>that mail clients will preserve References information.
And then I dealt with specifically those words. Not only must an injector
be allowed to insert or change status headers that it defines for some
non-news application, you argue, but it must be allowed to modify the
submitted Subject header because gosh it might want to put some status
information in the Subject header, too, when it isn't actually acting as a
news injector.
We do not need to consider how non-news applications will deal with the
limits in this standard because they are not news applications, was the
main point. But you were able to dismiss it all as an incorrect
"paraphrase" because I used the word "bug" instead of "request".
You win. You lose any right to complain about news software that changes
headers in a way you don't like because you won the right to have them
change headers so they can be used as is for non-news applications, but
you win this discussion. And it's my fault, I didn't go back and insert a
direct quote from you the first time.
So, what other applications need to do things that this draft
hinders, so we can get all the pesky prohibitions out of the way of
anything at all that might want to be done? Hey, DOS doesn't deal well
with colons, so we have to get rid of the colons in the headers because
someone might want to use a header as a filename for some application.
Do you get the point now? Or are you stuck on "request" vs. "bug"? Think
of it this way: every bug report is an implicit request for a software
fix. There, happy now?