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Re: FW: I-D Action: draft-kucherawy-received-state-00.txt

2011-11-19 02:26:29



On 11/19/2011 3:21 PM, Bill McQuillan wrote:
What I am trying to get clear is whether the date-time on the
Received: field is the instant that the delaying state *started* or
the instant that the delaying state *ended*.

Perhaps I'm being pedantic,


You are, but this is a spec and it's kinda expected.

That said, the Received semantics have always been quite vague about distinctions such as entering into vs. departing from. I think the general belief is that it's applied when the message "enters into" but I would /never/ want to have any system action be based on that assumption.

Hence the challenge for the current work is whether to stay with that vagueness or attempt to impose much more precise sequence definitions than (I believe) has previously applied.

I'm not a fan of false precision and I /am/ a fan of flexibility -- don't constrain things unless there's a strong need -- and I don't see the clear and immediate benefit of our imposing the precision that you are (implicitly?) asking for.

I think it's fine that you are asking about this; I'm merely expressing a preference for coarse-grained precision.[1]


d/


[1] The first message system I specified displayed an "incorporating new mail" message, with a 3-dot elipses since things tended to be slow. It then put out an additional dot for each new message. My boss came in one day and asked me to remove the elipses. This seemed odd so I asked why. he said he wanted to be able to count the dots and know how many messages he had gotten. This was my first experience with seeking too much precision at the wrong place...


--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net