From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon May 06 2002 - 11:22:13 CDT
In <87n0vessoy.fsf@erlenstar.demon.co.uk> Andrew Gierth <andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk> writes:
>1. It is still too long (two or three times longer than should be
>necessary)
Yes, we could indeed take another 12 months on a complete rewrite.
>2. It still attempts to introduce changes which are unnecessarily
>incompatible with existing implementations (for example, the
>introduction of purely cosmetic whitespace and folding, comments, or
>parameters, into important machine-parsed headers)
But these are all directed to making a cleaner system, with better
compatibility with Email, in the long term. They are all SHOULD NOT
generate.
>3. It still confuses technical issues with aesthetic and policy ones.
>For example, the use of "MUST NOT" in connection with auto-creation of
>groups from traffic is not justifiable on interoperability grounds.
>Likewise for much of the section on newsgroup-names.
There has been a rough consensus within the working group to include
policy issues in the draft (but clearly indicated as such). We have has a
straw poll on the use of "Ought", and have also cleared that usage with
the area director.
However, if there are particular cases that you want moving from MUST to
Ought, or vice versa, then now is the time to raise them.
>You may take it as given that I will object (especially on the grounds
>of incompatibility with established practice) to any attempt to move
>this document forward in its current form.
This is noted.
-- 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