Those of us from netnews land are still here and listening. My take is:
1. Let's put it to bed already!
Hear hear.
2. Netnews will likely adopt MIME, whole cloth, but never raw (i.e.
always encoded for 7bit transport). At least, this is what I want,
because it will vastly simplify introduction. I'm sure that someone
will disagree with me. Let's argue someplace else about it.
Sigh. I hate to have to ask this, but I think I need to listen on this debate.
Please let me know where this discussion is going to take place. On some
mailing list or other? Or let me guess -- in a newsgroup?!?
I don't have an opinion on this, really, since I don't know that much about the
nature of netnews transports and how they work (or, more importantly, how they
are broken ;-). But I find that I need to know a lot more about news than I do
right now, and this sounds like a great place to listen and learn.
3. If I never have to write an encoder for the mail->netnews gateway
code, I will be happy.
I worry about the ones that already exist and whether we can make them
MIME-aware, specifically when it comes to digests (see below).
4. Digests are a foul, evil thing. They should be stamped out. They
were originally intended as an efficiency item - mail batching to keep
MIT-MC from overloading itself on processing too many mailing lists.
Netnews handles this problem in the depths of the transport,
completely invisibly to the user. Digests are, therefore, a sender
limited presentation format. I don't believe that the sender should be
able to do that - I think it should be up to the user (with his trusty
netnews interface) to determine presentation style & format. This does
not mean that I am against moderated groups - far from it! I would not
have saved them from extinction some years ago if I did not believe in
the mechanism.
This sounds like a very reasonable position to me. But at least a quarter of
the newsgroups I read are digestified. I guess I'm unlucky.
I'm going to take an action item on this and implement an undigestifier in my
mail to notes (DEC's answer to news, you don't want to know the details)
interface. We'll see how it flies.
If we agree that digests should be burst apart when they are fed into news, how
about multipart postings (i.e. multipart messages)? Any thoughts?
Ned