ietf-822
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Re: prevervation of installed base

2003-01-09 23:43:51

Andrew Gierth <andrew(_at_)erlenstar(_dot_)demon(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk> writes:

the most important technical difference (as I personally see it - my
opinions may differ from others involved in USEFOR) is that gateways for
individual groups or hierarchies do not have to contend with the use of
non-ASCII _newsgroup names_ unless they specifically choose to do
so. (In such cases there is generally no particular need to preserve the
Newsgroups header accurately in the case of crossposts to groups not
handled by the same gateway; furthermore, if the gateway is implemented
via the moderation mechanism, this becomes a non-issue anyway).

This is an extremely good point, which I'd like to highlight as well.

In general, the only existing news to mail gatewaying that would
potentially need to deal with non-ASCII *newsgroup names* is the
moderation relaying.  (Although there is some possibility that non-ASCII
newsgroup names would show up for other gateways in crossposts or in a
header like Followup-To, those headers are generally meaningless in mail
and therefore losing them or mangling them causes no major and likely few
minor problems.)

The case for mail compatibility is much, much stronger for Subject, From,
and other such shared headers than it is for Newsgroups, Followup-To,
Control, and other similar Usenet-only headers that contain newsgroup
names.  (I think there is still some case for mail compatibility with the
latter headers as well, on the basis that it's very convenient to write
software that works seamlessly with both mail and news, but there's a lot
more room for various approaches other than trying to strictly follow the
same rules one would follow for a mail header.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)             
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>