From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue May 07 2002 - 19:14:41 CDT
Andrew Gierth <andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk> writes:
> there are probably more, but I have some real work to do at this point.
MIME-style parameters are introduced wholesale in existing headers rather
than just in newly added headers, and there is, so far as I know, no
operational experience with this.
There's a whole bunch of pointless pseudo-standardization of the structure
of the body of messages that would save several pages if it were ripped
out in its entirety or moved into an informational RFC.
UTF-8 newsgroup names break moderated groups as nigh-universally
implemented today.
There is very little operational experience with the new Path stuff on the
broader Usenet.
The description of the Distribution header bears little resemblence to the
reality of implementations and it's highly unlikely that implementations
are going to change to match.
There's no operational experience with Injector-Info, and it doesn't serve
quite the same purpose as NNTP-Posting-Host is being used for today. It's
not going to *hurt* anything technically, but there's also no evidence to
indicate that it will actually clean anything up rather than just becoming
Yet Another Trace Header that some sites have and some sites don't. It's
excessively complex, hard to parse, and doesn't address many of the actual
uses of trace headers.
There are random limitations and side comments about MIME rather than just
adopting MIME, mostly serving to just confuse the issue or to make various
policy points that aren't relevant to the underlying *protocol*. Some of
this may be good material for a best practices document.
application/news-transmission isn't going to win us any friends among most
moderators.
There is no operational experience with mvgroup apart from an experiment
with C News and I'm not aware of a widely used server that's deployed
support for this.
The changes in the body syntax of newgroup and the MIME type of
checkgroups are not existing practice, are not currently implemented, and
are unlikely to be implemented any time soon in many parts of Usenet.
Again, no operational experience with whether this will break anything.
The initial article idea has, again, never been implemented and we have no
idea how it will work in practice.
No operational experience with the new parameters to the checkgroups
message.
In general, I'll make the comment that if someone has a really great idea
about how to improve Usenet and it doesn't get implemented by any major
server, it's quite possible and possibly likely that either the idea isn't
actually a good idea or it is a sound idea that doesn't actually improve
things sufficiently to be worth implementing. If no one bothered to write
and deploy the code, it's rather questionable whether it should be in a
standards-track document.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>