Frank Ellermann wrote:
John C Klensin wrote:
[RFC 3461, 3464, and 4409 references only informative]
its appearance in that particular SHOULD does not make the
reference normative -- one does not need to understand RFC 4409
in order to make a competent and conforming implementation of
2821/ 2821bis.
Implementing 2821bis is one thing, but many readers might be
only interested in understanding how SMTP is supposed to work
today - admins, postmasters, users, and email-arch authors.
How about developers? Why is there this "air" that everything is
written in a "PERL" script?
However, overall, I think it is excellent proposition in that we do need
a NEW SPEC that is clean but still makes it compatible with the way we
expect yesterday and today.
OTOH I don't see why RFC 1123 is "normative": It broke a
clear concept of responsibility in RFC 821, its attempt to
simplify RFC 974 wasn't too good after all, and 2821bis
replaces everything in the relevant RFC 1123 chapter 5.
IMO RFC 1123 belongs to the set of informative references
(974, 1047, 1652, 1869, 1870, 2821) obsoleted by 2821bis.
To me, a few years back RFC 1123 was the closet thing to a "Holy Bible."
1123 was more important than 2821, but then again, 2821 was still new.
It should be noted that we are a multi-hosting software vendor, POP3,
SMTP, FTP, TELNET, etc, so RFC 1123 served as a good summary as a
complete Hosting Guide.
But I think we need a new SMTP summary guide. In some respect we get
lost in the "history", which is important, but use it too much to
interfere with progress. And I'm not speaking of progress that breaks
history, but progress that offers migration and backward compatibility.
Thats not an easy thing to do.
--
Sincerely
Hector Santos, CTO
http://www.santronics.com
http://santronics.blogspot.com