--On Saturday, April 03, 2004 16:15 -0600 "Eric A. Hall"
<ehall(_at_)ehsco(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 4/3/2004 12:23 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
Actually, yes it is, especially given operational experience
with clients that won't even accept a multiline response in
that situation but are sure that the only possible responses
are:
Why would the client negotiate an extension it couldn't
handle? Of course, that applies to almost of the potential
response models, so as far as that goes, any of them will be
fine if whatever does get chosen is clearly defined and
requires negotiation--if they all suck then its just a matter
of which form of suckiness do we want right.
Because, unsurprisingly, the implementation/ deployment pattern
for SMTP extensions is that
* things that are easy to do and don't upset existing
logic are more likely to be implemented than those that
are harder.
* things that are of obvious high value and leverage on
good service are more likely to be implemented than
those of small marginal value or low expectations of
value.
Now, you are talking about making something that is hard (for
the reason above) and of low marginal value (see below). Even
trying to define such things may be a waste of time, and they
clearly violate Marshall's principle about ubiquitous deployment
(which is part of the standard and part of the criteria for IETF
approval of an extension).
Please try to think about these things from the standpoint of an
implementer and commercial vendor, even if you don't directly
have very much of that experience.
The thing I like about 353/.../250 is that it leaves the
intermediary response codes clean and transparent, while all
of the others result in semantic difficulties ("250-550" is
confusing as heck, while "250-2.1.5" is non-conformant) or
break other parts of the model ("250-"/"550-"), and is why I
used it in the draft last week.
See above.
At this point the whole thing is mostly an intellectual
exercise. The best solution is what I pondered in the original
message--put it off until a replacement service is developed
that can handle this kind of stuff from the beginning.
In this context, this statement is equivalent to "you have been
deliberately wasting our time by expecting the proposal to be
taken seriously". Perhaps we need a mailing list, in some
Fantasy tree, for ideas that would be need to have in SMTP if,
e.g, the world was flat. My apologies for being harsh, but,...
john