"Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu> writes:
Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
I agree that 2047 is not suitable for this purpose. My guess is
that the IDNA stuff is the best starting point.
Russ> IDNA certainly will be the easiest to implement for the servers.
I don't think I entirely agree - you seem to be assuming that the
server can avoid implementing the encoding, but this is not
necessarily true once you start thinking about administrative issues
such as adding or removing groups.
There is also the 'mp3 problem' - certain sequences of US-ASCII
characters appearing as the encoded form of a non-ASCII name will have
undesired consequences on the propagation of groups.
Russ> Note that there is no way to avoid a 7-bit encoding for
Russ> newsgroup names without significant changes to the Usenet
Russ> architecture, since posts to moderated groups are sent to
Russ> <group-name>@moderators.isc.org by default and to some
Russ> variation on that including the group-name even for hierarchies
Russ> that don't use the isc.org forwarding system. This requires
Russ> embedding the newsgroup name in an SMTP envelope, and I don't
Russ> expect any 8-bit encoding to work reliably enough there in the
Russ> near future.
plus, there is the '.' to '-' translation issue which one has to be
careful of, and the fact that some sites are (bogusly) rejecting '%'
in local-parts, so there are considerations that apply to this
encoding that may be awkward in other contexts. This is one of the
reasons why my proposal (which was the basis for what ended up in the
draft, other than the fact that I did not propose using UTF-8 for
anything other than newsgroup names, or in message/rfc822) did not
suggest using the encoding everywhere, but strictly at mail<->news
borders such as the moderation mechanism. (Since only newsgroup names
are affected, existing group- or hierarchy-specific gateways don't
need to do anything special.)
This can be retroactively implemented for many existing injectors
simply by wrapping the mail-to-moderator script to do the necessary
conversions to the destination address and the Newsgroups header. This
should be easier than doing it in all clients.
--
Andrew.