Re: Extending news to EAI

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <> Julien ÉLIE <julien@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>Hi Charles,

>> So the experimental protocol would start off with the extensions allowed
>> by RFC5535, and then add UTF-8 in the Newsgroups header.

>I think it will also require to change the possible values for "argument"
>here:

>   control         =  "Control:" SP *WSP control-command *WSP CRLF
>   control-command =  verb *( 1*WSP argument )
>   verb            =  token
>   argument        =  1*( %x21-7E )

>We need to be able to use UTF-8 in "argument".


>Could it also be possible to extend dist-list to allow UTF-8 distributions?

>   distribution    =  "Distribution:" SP dist-list CRLF
>   dist-list       =  *WSP dist-name
>                      *( [FWS] "," [FWS] dist-name ) *WSP
>   dist-name       =  ALPHA / DIGIT
>                      *( ALPHA / DIGIT / "+" / "-" / "_" )

Yes, there are various minor things that would need to be extended apart
from the Newgroups header (including the newsgroups line and the
checkgroups message).

>Incidentally, may it exist hostnames in UTF-8 (for the Path: header field)
>or are they always canonized in ASCII?

That is an interesting question, which would need dicussion, but does not
look like a show stopper.

>> It has already been established that the existing transport mechanisms
>> will move such articles around without problem.

>Is there any record of that?  Which news servers (and versions) were tested?

It should be documented in the early archives of this list.

Here is a typical Path for an article that reached news.dotsrc.org:

Path:
  news.sunsite.dk!dotsrc.org!news.szn.dk!news.bunk.cc!pnx.dk!
  newsfeed101.telia.com!nf02.dk.telia.net!news.tele.dk!
  feed118.news.tele.dk!not-for-mail

It is really a question of whether a server has it in its active file. If
so, then there is no reason why it should not pass straight through it.
The flooding algorithm will, as usual, find a way around any servers that
don't participate, but is will simply be a configuration affair rather
than any failure of implementation.

The real difficulty will be in user agents. I can read the danish group in
Opera, but for some reason it doesn't like yours. Ensuring there is a
working Path between your server and news.dotsrc.org might be worth a try.

>> Some early USEFOR drafts show how the Newsgroups header was to be
>> extended. In particular, it required some very strict normalization, so
>> that a si...

>The last draft seems to be -09, Section 5.5:
>    http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/usefor/drafts/draft-ietf-usefor-article-09.txt

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