From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 28 2002 - 16:15:58 CST
John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> writes:
> Thanks so much for pointing out where my paraphrase was wrong, or how
> the argument I made based on it was wrong.
My original message was a somewhat meandering discussion of possible
issues that occurred to me, to see if anyone else thought they were
significant. I said in my message that this may very well be what SHOULD
is good for. No one else felt that those issues were particularly
significant, and Charles felt that this was indeed what SHOULD was for.
Charles also pointed out that the standard already provides for the
addition of new headers, which I should have remembered and which does
address most of the situations that I was thinking of already. That was
useful information to be reminded of.
That is, to me, a fairly productive conversation. Your rewriting of my
message to add a degree of strictness, concreteness, and insistance which
was not present in the original message was not helpful.
I'm not interested in correcting your paraphrases after the fact. I'm
interested in not having my e-mail messages rewritten into a completely
different tone and argument and then put forward as something that I
believe.
Most people on this mailing list care primarily about Usenet. I seem to
be in a minority of people who use netnews technology and netnews articles
for applications other than a widely-distributed social communications
medium. As such, when they occur to me, I raise issues that come out of
use of netnews for things other than world-wide discussion groups, since
otherwise those issues may not be raised in this forum. Sometimes those
issues are worth caring about in the context of this standard, and
sometimes they're not.
> 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.
The primary purpose of a standard is not to create a "right to complain,"
and in fact there is a variety of stuff that has been proposed for this
standard in order to create such a "right" that I disagree with. The
primary purpose of a standard is to allow people to write interoperable
software. If you write software that will break if the injector modifies
any header other than those listed, there are some news servers that will
break it. There are some news servers that rewrite the From header, for
example. In this case, this is probably not a significant issue, but
these sorts of problems should at least be raised when working on a
standardization of a protocol in widespread nearly-unstandardized use.
SHOULD means that you have to be prepared to deal with it even if it's not
supposed to happen, which is probably the right level of guarantee in this
area.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>