Re: #1047 Path field delimiters and syntax - status

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <> Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>(politeness off)
No need. What you write is as polite as ever.

>Yes, IP addresses will occur in Path. They already do (v4), and any system 
>that doesn't pass on articles that contain them is so broken that it's got 
>no business passing itself off as an USENET server.

>> You are bolting the
>> stable door after the horse has bolted (so I shall nip it in the bud :-)
>> ). [Sorry, joke might be hard for Norwegians, but Englishmen with a
>> smattering of Irish politics should get it.]

>Your own statistics proved positively that using IP addresses for 
>IDENTIFYING YOUR OWN SYSTEM is a very rare occurence, if it occurs at all; 
>we have no idea why those IP addresses you couldn't divine a purpose of 
>were in the Path: of the articles you looked at.

Agreed, but there is a significant use for diagnostics.

However, having a different syntax for "identification names" and
"diagnostic names" is an additional complication which gives you no extra
benefit (in particular, it does not affect the dead/beef problem, which is
already present on account of the diagnostic usage).

So what is the justification for the restriction? To say there is no
existing usage does not seem sufficient justification to me (though I have
no problem with writing verbiage to discourage its use without good
reason, on the grounds that domain names are much better).

>Saying that giving a name to your system is REQUIRED by the standards is a 
>Good Thing, and allows us to positively refuse to allow such idiocies as 
>using an IP address to identify your server in injection-info.

Why is it an "idiocy"? We are talking about globally routable IP addresses
which are allocated according to a very well defined procedure. So, in
fact, they would actually be safer than "barewords".

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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