ietf-822
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Re: prevervation of installed base

2003-01-09 20:46:48

Charles,

Wednesday, January 8, 2003, 2:58:57 PM, you wrote:
Charles> In <38167744153(_dot_)20030107093025(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com> Dave 
Crocker <dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com> writes:
To add to Ned's correction, news-> email gatewaying has been around for at
least 20 years, as far as I can recall. Organizations have often wanted to
plug mailing lists into newsgroups. To permit the newsgroup readers to
participate in the mailing list, a news->email gateway is required. In other
environments, the 2-way gatewaying is simply part of a model that lets users
decide how they want to receive and process their group discussion messages.

Charles> Yes indeed, but those are not GENERAL-PURPOSE gateways.

I have no idea was technical differences you think exist between whatever it
is you have in mind and the examples I described.

So, please characterize those technical differences, in enough detail to
evalute their impact on the current work.

With respect to the appearance of new capabilities (such as new data formats
and encodings) in the installed base, your use of the term "gobbledegook"
needs to be made more precise. If it means that that a legacy system
receives the data and the data are legal but meaningless -- MIME base64 is
example of this approach -- then it is fine. It permits incremental adoption
without breaking existing systems. The downside for existing systems is that
they do not get the benefit of the new feature, but everything else
continues to work fine.

Charles> Yes, that is exactly what I mean. If someone in the newsgroup suddenly
Charles> starts using raw UTF-8 in his name (a phrase) or in his Subject, the
Charles> existing gateway is unlikely to fall over and collapse.

unlikely.

you seem to miss the point that the IETF does not make new standards that
break old standards.  parallel effort is fine, but you do not lay down a new
thing that violates an old one.

your use of "unlikely" basically ends this discussion.

standards work uses statistics to make guesses about needs, but it does not
use it to decide whether a technology is valid.  either it breaks things or
it doesn't.  "unlikely" is not in the vocabulary.  (it breaks the
discussion.)

d/
-- 
 Dave <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
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