Russ Allbery <rra(_at_)Stanford(_dot_)EDU> writes:
Brett Kottmann <bkottmann(_at_)webteamone(_dot_)com> writes:
I've seen the discussions go on for some time...is it just me or does
anyone else think that stating "the format of a news message and header
shall conform to the current standard for email message bodies and
headers" would save a great deal of time?
Yes, it does. It saves a vast amount of time, which is why almost
exactly that phrasing was used in RFC 1036, the previous standard for
news messages.
The attempted removal of that phrase from the current USEFOR draft has,
by itself, probably resulted in something on the order of two years of
argument and debate.
It occurs to me that I failed to mention something important here, which
may not be clear from the discussions so far. The reason why this topic
came up in the first place is that there is demand for non-ASCII newsgroup
names, and when attempting to find a way to deal with that, one simply
cannot adopt what mail did, since mail has no concept of newsgroup names.
Using RFC 2047 for the Newsgroups header is probably unworkable for a
variety of reasons, most notably being that RFC 2047 is not a unique
encoding format (there are multiple ways to encode the same word), and all
existing Usenet software requires that a given newsgroup have one and only
one textual representation.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>