From: Jean-Marc Desperrier (jean-marc.desperrier@certplus.com)
Date: Tue Oct 22 2002 - 10:57:46 CDT
Russ Allbery a dit :
>Those of you who participate in national hierarchies where this is really
>important have an excellent testing bed to start working on a solution,
>much better than the rest of us do. You have a limited audience, often on
>a reasonably defined set of servers, you can determine the major clients
>the local users are using to read news, and you can try things locally
>without requiring anyone else's approval.
>
The trouble is that this what is happening now, and what has been
implemented since _years_, and that the result is a solution that works
only locally, on a limited audience, on local user.
That solution that has almost universally adopted is to use unencoded
local encoding.
The problem is that if you want to normalize and universalize it, it
_does not work_, because the local encoding is never the same everywhere.
What USEFOR must do is to set something that intead of working only for
a limited subset really works universally.
And we had almost reached that two months ago, before a bunch of new
people arrived, went into endless arguing, and did not bring ANYTHING
constructive to the draft, just went dragging on and on and on about the
problems without providing any alternative that did look like having any
chance of success to those actually participating in national
hierarchies where the problem is really important.
> Another problem is that the issue is fundamentally hard, and fundamentally
> hard protocol issues require that someone sit down and do a lot of hard
> work in writing code.
No the issue is not fundamentally hard.
The trouble is that no solution will make everybody happy, and any solution will require an amount of code rewrite that will justify itself if we are certain this is what will be keeped.
And the difficulty is not to write new code that support the new
protocol, but to get the owners of popular programms to update their
code to support the new format.