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Internet-Drafts | 1 Dec 2003 21:31
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I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-usefor-article-12.txt

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the Usenet Article Standard Update Working Group of the IETF.

	Title		: News Article Format and Transmission
	Author(s)	: C. Lindsey
	Filename	: draft-ietf-usefor-article-12.txt
	Pages		: 95
	Date		: 2003-12-1
	
This Draft is intended as a standards track document, obsoleting
RFC 1036, which itself dates from 1987.
This Standard defines the format of Netnews articles and specifies
the requirements to be met by software which originates, distributes,
stores and displays them.
Since the 1980s, Usenet has grown explosively, and many Internet and
non-Internet sites now participate. In addition, the Netnews
technology is now in widespread use for other purposes.
Backward compatibility has been a major goal of this endeavour, but
where this standard and earlier documents or practices conflict, this
standard should be followed. In most such cases, current practice is
already compatible with these changes.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-usefor-article-12.txt

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Nick Boalch | 2 Dec 2003 17:48
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Status

Hi all,

Returning to this list after a work-forced absence of three or four months, 
everything seems to have stopped.

Kent's archives suggest everything petered out over the summer and despite a 
brief resurgence in September very little happened in October. Yet there was a 
new working-draft posted on November 24.

What actually is the status of the WG and the draft?

Regards,

N.

--

-- 
Nick Boalch, Research Student
School of Modern European Languages         Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 5780
University of Durham                        Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 5770
New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK               WWW: http://nick.frejol.org/
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Henry Spencer | 2 Dec 2003 18:32

Re: Status

On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, Nick Boalch wrote:
> Kent's archives suggest everything petered out over the summer and despite a 
> brief resurgence in September very little happened in October. Yet there was a
> new working-draft posted on November 24.
> What actually is the status of the WG and the draft?

Basically, drifting, for lack of attention by our supposed Chairs.  The new
draft is partly our frustrated Editor's attempt to stir up some action.

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry <at> spsystems.net
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Russ Allbery | 2 Dec 2003 18:46
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Re: Status

Nick Boalch <n.g.boalch <at> durham.ac.uk> writes:

> Returning to this list after a work-forced absence of three or four
> months, everything seems to have stopped.

> Kent's archives suggest everything petered out over the summer and
> despite a brief resurgence in September very little happened in
> October. Yet there was a new working-draft posted on November 24.

> What actually is the status of the WG and the draft?

Everything has pretty much stopped, except Charles is doing various things
that he thinks are right and producing new drafts based on that, without
any real feedback from anyone.  (He's asked for it, but few people if
anyone are providing it.  I'm personally not because I believe that the
current approach to this standard is completely wrong and am not
interested in participating until it changes radically.)

--

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra <at> stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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Pete Resnick | 2 Dec 2003 22:45

Re: Where are our Chairs?

On 11/25/03 at 9:23 PM +0000, Charles Lindsey wrote:

>We have not heard from our Chairs for months.

A quick note from one of your chairs:

As you may or may not have known, I was brought on as chair as 
someone who could navigate IETF waters, and Andrew was brought on to 
really head up the effort. (I am currently chair for two other 
working groups as well, and USEFOR is by no means smack in the middle 
of my expertise.) For whatever reasons, Andrew has been incommunicado 
for some time now, and in all honesty I have already spent more time 
on this than I had intended. And of course to make things even more 
complicated, Ned has been recovering from *major* surgery over the 
past few months.

I have dropped Ned a note to see if he can get things back on track.

pr
--

-- 
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102
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Nick Boalch | 2 Dec 2003 23:30
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Initial comments on Usage draft <draft-ietf-usefor-useage--1.03>

It looks good. The tone seems appropriate and the draft consistency reads with 
clarity.

Would it be useful for readers to have, in addition to the clearly explained 
and annotated items currently presented in the draft, a summary in simple 
bullet-point form of the requirements, perhaps presented as a conclusion to 
the draft?

(I'll perhaps have a go at reducing the draft's advice to individual points, 
to see if it can be achieved without compromising the actual validity of the 
advice too far.)

On individual points:

Section 3.1.1.2 on address munging suggests user-agents make it difficult to 
munge addresses. Though I've no wish to stir up old arguments, I think this is 
a little misguided as evidence in the wild suggests a powerful trend towards 
address munging. I would have:

	... the practice. However, it shows how to do it "correctly"
	and it is NOT recommended that implementors facilitate other
	means of disguising addresses.

(I think encouraging use of .invalid as opposed to the made-up names, use of 
other people's domain names and other such foolery currently seen all over 
Usenet is a good thing.)

An internal note in section 3.1.1.3 refers to a draft on Message-ID 
construction prepared early on in the project. Are you referring to 
'Recommendations for generating Message-IDs' (Matt Curtin and Jwz) or
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Charles Lindsey | 3 Dec 2003 11:54
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Re: Initial comments on Usage draft <draft-ietf-usefor-useage--1.03>

In <3FCD1289.9050403 <at> durham.ac.uk> Nick Boalch <n.g.boalch <at> durham.ac.uk> writes:

>It looks good. The tone seems appropriate and the draft consistency reads with 
>clarity.

At Last! Some Discussion!

>Would it be useful for readers to have, in addition to the clearly explained 
>and annotated items currently presented in the draft, a summary in simple 
>bullet-point form of the requirements, perhaps presented as a conclusion to 
>the draft?

Yes, an appendix might be possible. The GNKSA has a short summary in it as
well as the main texts. However, first priority is to decide what issues
we want to include/not include. Summaries can come later.

>On individual points:

>Section 3.1.1.2 on address munging suggests user-agents make it difficult to 
>munge addresses....

>	... the practice. However, it shows how to do it "correctly"
>	and it is NOT recommended that implementors facilitate other
>	means of disguising addresses.

I think this stems from discussions some years back. We were taking the
line that munging was a Bad Thing, though possibly necessary in the
current climate, and we looked forward to the day when it would no longer
be necessary (well, perhaps now that the US Congress has decided exactly
what Spam is, that day may have come :-( ). Anyway, that was the origin of
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Nick Boalch | 3 Dec 2003 16:01
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Re: Initial comments on Usage draft <draft-ietf-usefor-useage--1.03>

Charles Lindsey wrote:

>>An internal note in section 3.1.1.3 refers to a draft on Message-ID 
>>construction prepared early on in the project. Are you referring to 
>>'Recommendations for generating Message-IDs' (Matt Curtin and Jwz) or 
>>'Guidelines for the Generation of Message IDs and Similar Unique Identifiers' 
>>(Claus Andre Faerber) -- I'm assuming the latter.
> 
> No, I was thinking of the former. Can you give me a pointer to the latter?

Both are available from the Usefor Archive on landfield.com: the Curtin & 
Zawinski draft from July 1998 at 
<URL:http://www.landfield.com/usefor/drafts/draft-ietf-usefor-message-id-01.txt> 
and the Faerber draft from September 1998 at 
<URL:http://www.landfield.com/usefor/drafts/draft-ietf-usefor-msg-id-alt-00.txt>

> And do people think this WG should be promoting an Informational document
> on those lines (no, NOT NOW! Later when these present drafts are out of
> the way)?

Personally I can't see any reason why not. Consistent generation of unique 
Message-IDs is a sufficiently important thing that I think it deserves some 
attention, and as long as we have a draft anyway...

>>Section 3.1.1.4 - I don't see any real reason why the MUST NOT needs to be 
>>downgraded. Are there hordes of people queuing up to start their 
>>Subject-headers with "cmsg "?
> 
> I dunno. Are there still extant servers that interpret a Subject: cmsg...
> as a control message and create new groups from it? If so, they are
(Continue reading)

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Henry Spencer | 3 Dec 2003 16:20

Re: Initial comments on Usage draft <draft-ietf-usefor-useage--1.03>

On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Charles Lindsey wrote:
> I dunno. Are there still extant servers that interpret a Subject: cmsg...
> as a control message and create new groups from it?

There probably are a few, just because there is so much *really old*
software still in use in corners of the net.  But I think we are beyond
point where backward compatibility with them is a real issue.

> >Do we have any comment to make in 3.1.1.9 about posting agents generating 
> >Followup-To headers pointing to groups which do not exist on their immediate 
> >host? (I believe most current servers disallow this behaviour.)
> 
> ...I think you have a point, and I have made a note of it. Anyone
> else support the idea?

Extending this from Newsgroups to cover Followup-To as well seems
reasonable to me. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry <at> spsystems.net
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Nick Boalch | 3 Dec 2003 17:34
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Comments on Usage draft section 3.2.* ('The Well-Behaved Followup Agent')

Section 3.2.1.5 mandates that "Followup agents SHOULD trim message identifiers 
out of a References-header" where the number of message identifiers exceeds 
21. This seems to be an inconsistency with [USEFOR] section 8.6.4, which 
merely says that "Followup agents MAY trim References-headers which have grown 
to excessive length".

Also in this section, it's not clear to me whether the suggested trimming 
behaviour ("removing sufficient identifiers starting with the second so as to 
bring the total down to 21") is intended to work from the beginning or end of 
the References-header: i.e. does 'the second identifier' refer to the second 
identifier reading the References-header left-to-right (which would be the 
parent message of the immediate message being followed up) or the second 
identifier reading right-to-left (which would be the second message in the 
thread). Should this be clarified, or am I just dull?

Regards,

N.

--

-- 
Nick Boalch, Research Student
School of Modern European Languages         Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 5780
University of Durham                        Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 5770
New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK               WWW: http://nick.frejol.org/
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Gmane