Greg,
I think you made an articulate presnetation of the advantages
of MIME-PEM vs. 822-PEM at the WG meeting, and in your messages prior
to the IETF. You have also done a good job of explaining, in those
messages, what a minimal MIME processing capability entails for both
submission and delivery. I don't think we need to debate the relative
ease of such processing since your messages, as well as the cited
Appendix, provide the detail required for the WG members to decide
for themselves.
You are correct in observing that several attendees espoused
support for MIME-PEM over 822-PEM and I apologize if the minutes did
not do a good job of representing that aspect of the discussion.
I note that your message about the merits of a transition to
MIME-PEM from 822-PEM, and Jim Galvin's message about engineering
minimal syntactics changes to 822-PEM to make it processible by
MIME-PEM readers are not technically incompatible, but they do have
very different flavors. The former position calls for replacing
822-PEM with MIME-PEM, while the latter calls for making changes to
822-PEM which would NOT be equivalent to requiring a MIME UA
capability. These are not equivalent proposals and both are being put
forth at this time. Thus there is ample room for confusion about the
direction that PEM may take re MIME. I'm sorry if that confusion was
compounded by the meeting minutes.
Steve