Hi Stef,
I understand your discouragement and frustation:
Well, what discourages me more than anything else is to now discover
that the real power meetings are the ones at the IETF, and that all this
netmail discussion is only for the purpose of identifying the issues
that will be decided by those who attend the IETF meetings.
For the record, the last three meetings were all held at a time when I
could simply not get to the meetings. Of what value is my effort to
participate in the netmail discussions then!
I now see that I have had a great deal of my time and effort wasted by
this latter day procedural decision that was not well articulated early
in the process. Indeed, as I read things, this was decided more or less
at the last meeting, that all the netmail work can and should be shelved
since the proponents are not present to serve as advocates. It is
interesting how they were faked into believing that they did not need to
be there to defend their work!
but I don't believe your time and effort has been wasted. On the issue of
nested encodings I see the following progression:
St. Louis: encoding at any level is allowed
(very little implementational experience at this point)
Netmail discussion: Oh, oh. There's a (very big) problem with
high-level encoding. Mark proposes that it be banned.
Atlanta: strong division over allowing transport-encoding of
multi-part, message types. The proposal to allow it
temporarily to gain more implementational experience
barely passes. (Mark's proxy 1000 votes against disallowed.)
Netmail discussion: lots of very detailed discussion leading to
near-agreement that multi-part and message types are
not allowed to be transport-encoded. (I know I'm ahead
of the vote. Sorry.)
It would have been impossible in the time allowed for the Atlanta 822
meeting, to even read all the mail generated since, let alone digest and
respond to it. It is very unfortunate that you (and Mark, John and others)
could not be in Atlanta, though I think the result would still have been
strong division on this issue. We are now closer to agreement than we
have ever been. If we can settle this with a vote now, let's do it.
My vote is to explicitly disallow transport-encoding of types multi-part
and message.
Jim