From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Jun 24 2004 - 08:47:05 CDT
Bruce Lilly said:
> Henry Spencer wrote:
>
> Henry,we've been over this many times before.
Yes we have, and you have repeartedly refused to listen to what other
members of this list have been saying. That is the reason for the
"many times".
> A message is a message, and all
> messages
> need to be able to have common components (including the Subject
> field)
> interpreted in a common way,...
Yes, but there is no law of the Universe that says News has to follow
exactly everything in RFC 2822. Our job is to define Netnews. Insofar
as we can build upon RFC 2822, then it is right and proper to do so.
BUT there are some features of RFC 2822 that just will not work in
News (and some of them never will). So we have had to be selective.
otherwise establisheL and widely-deployed
>
> Aside from IMAP, there are
> common UAs that handle news and mail, and such UAs use common code to
> handle the common message format.
So agents that want to handle both news and mail will have to aork
within the intersection of RFC 2822 and our draft. Fortunately that is
not a hard thing to do (and, in particular, nothing we are proposing
to say regarding back-references seems to cause any problem).
>
> In short, you're asking if we have the authority to redefine RFCs 822
> and 2822. The answer should be obvious. That's not in our charter,
> and
> is managed by a separate IETF WG.
Nobody is proposing to alter RFC 2822 (though there are some things
that will need attention in its next revision). The scope of RFC 2822
is clearly set out in its introductory section, which clearly refers
to "electronic mail". Therefore, it is not binding upon us, though it
would be foolish for us to depart from it without good reason, and
certainly not so in a way that would introduce new problems for agents
that rely on the similarity of the formats.
> Not just mail, compatibility with any other application of the common
> message format (mail certainly being the most widely used). The
> changes
> redress issues arising out of RFCs 850 and 1036, both of which were
> quite
> clear about the adoption of the common message format and that the
> defining
> RFC (822 at the time) had precedence in the case of conflicts.
No, the wording of RFC 11036 was quite muddled and self contradictory
at that point. It is not a good guide for us to slavishly adhere to.
The whole point of setting up this WG was to deal with the muddles
left by RFC 1036.
> That has also been asked and answered before. For two decades, news
> has
> intentionally used the common message format.
No it has not. News software has never used the mail message format in
full, whatever RFC 1036 may have said or not said. In this draft, we
have made strenuous efforts to bring practice into line with theory,
but it still has not been achieved 100%.
So forget RFC 1036. It is dead. We are writing its succcessor.
> The "news format is not an instance of the message format" and "we can
> make any damned changes to any standards we please" horses have long
> been
> dead. Please stop flogging them.
No, those horses are very much alive. We are charged with writing the
new Netnews standard. We need to follow preceding standards
"responsibly", not "blindly".
Charles.