ned+ietf-822(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote on 03.01.03 in
<01KQSMDJEP9A009OMN(_at_)mauve(_dot_)mrochek(_dot_)com>:
5. Insofar as these choices conflict with practice in the Email world,
there was a consciously taken decision to compress any resultant messiness
into the gateways. The number of these is small compared to the vast
number of Unsnet servers worldwide and the even vaster number of clients.
Yawn. Heard all these arugments before back with MIME. This doesn't
address the backwards compatibility issue, and like it or not this is
an issue you are going to have to address.
Which backwards compatibility issue? The ones I'm aware of are all on the
news side, and *are* addressed (though one can certainly debate if each
solution is the right one, as is always possible).
And that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. But you cannot break the
definition of existing media type as part of this process. Pick another
media type, for heaven's sake!
USEFOR *did* that, originally. This(!) mailing list pointed out that that
wouldn't work.
I guess the only way to find out is to actually try for last call and see
what happens; listening to individual people is going to stall the
standard forever.
I would refrain from arguing on the basis of what your charter currently
says if I were you. A WG whose current charter includes no goals and
milestones position in the IETF can only be described as "precarious". At a
minimum a rechartering exercise could be in order, and given recent
experience with charters and the IESG the resulting charter that would
emerge would be very likely to constrain you in ways you really would not
like.
Oh?
In which case I suspect that the Usenet people would say "Ok, so the RFC
standards process is a dead end", and will continue outside of that
process.
I don't see how that could be in the interests of IETF or IESG, but
whatever ...
The issue is instead that your approach in effect declares a large body of
software as being no longer compliant with long established standards. This
is something we try very hard not to do.
Actually, it does no such thing, as there *are currently no standard RFCs*
for news (article format, that is, there are for NNTP). 1036 was never a
standard, and doesn't adequately describe current Usenet anyway.
There *is no* "large body of software" that is compliant with any "long
established standard" that would then no longer be compliant with those
standards. It may be noncompliant with the news standard, but, again,
there never was a news standard it could have been compliant to before,
and dozens of programmers have noticed that complying with 1036 is not
actually all that useful in the real world.
This argument is utterly bogus.
The argument of "but everyone breaks the rules so we can too" has been made
countless times. I cannot recall a single case, however, where such an
argument made it past the IESG.
Of course, that *is not* the argument being made, as I suspect you are
very well aware.
I am not expecting getting Usefor past the IETF to be an easy task. But
then getting Usefore to make up its collective mind was not an easy task
either :-( .
Well, you're clearly set on this course and it seems unlikely that anything
I say is going to change it. So this wil be my final response on this
general set of issues.
Much more important, it seems unlikely that any other course is even
*possible*. Whatever you think of any actual WG consensus, anything *but*
WG consensus obviously doesn't even have a snowball's chance in hell.
MfG Kai