Ted Lindgreen writes:
On behalf of the EUnet backbone assembly I herewith present
the following resolution:
The following resolution was approved at the recent EUnet backbone
assembly in Hammamet, Tunesia 1992-02-17.
Votes: 17 for/0 against/3 abstain.
As a member of the IETF "822 extensions" working group with a
particular interest in character encoding issues, I take your message
very seriously, and would like you to provide a few more details so
that I might be able to judge EUnet's position.
First of all, I would like to know which document(s) the EUnet
backbone assembly reviewed before approving the resolution on February
17th, 1992.
The IETF working groups' official review documents are kept in the
"Internet Drafts" directories, and are openly available. The current
mnemonics-related documents are:
draft-ietf-822ext-charsets-04.txt 21 February 1992
draft-ietf-822ext-mnemonics-03.txt 21 February 1992
So, one of my questions is: Which version(s), of which document(s) did
the EUnet backbone assembly review? When did the review period start?
And when did the review period end? It is quite important to specify
the version(s) of the document(s) since the author has been making
some rather important changes recently.
Secondly, you state that the votes were "17 for/0 against/3 abstain".
Are these numbers of individuals? Numbers of countries? Are the EUnet
reviewers also on the IETF 822 extensions working group mailing list?
Are the EUnet reviewers aware of the past discussions on the IETF
mailing list?
EUnet, as a network organisation operation in 24 countries in Europe and
North Africa, has a need for multilingual character set support.
The MNEMONIC proposal in RFC-CHAR covers this need in a backward
compatible interoperable fashion, and has been adopted as the EUnet
standard and is in use since July 1990.
The wording "the EUnet standard" would normally imply that EUnet has
exactly one (1) standard. As far as I know, this is not the case. I
have been told that EUnet has made a "decision" to use 8-bit SMTP on
at least the backbone sites. 8-bit SMTP is apparently actively used in
some communities (e.g. Greece).
So when you say that the "MNEMONIC proposal" is "in use", I wonder to
what extent it is actually used. Can you give us some idea?
Thanks,
Erik M. van der Poel
erik(_at_)sra(_dot_)co(_dot_)jp
Software Research Associates, Inc., Tokyo, Japan TEL +81-3-3234-2692