ietf-nntp Informal Report on IETF Meeting?

[Brian Hernacki]

Jonathan Grobe wrote:

> Could any of the attendees at the IETF meeting give us an informal report
> of how things went?
>
> Jonathan Grobe.

Sure. We spent most of the time discussing issues in 977bis. There were alot
of them. Most of it was really nit-picking; wording changes, clarifications,
etc.

There wasn't much discussion of the common practices as people were in
general agreement.

We also had about 15 mins worth of disucssion about the search extension (we
ran out of time). There wasn't much contention here either. We skipped the
LIST and GET extension doc discussion due to lack of time.

I'm sure Stan will post a better summary, but I'll attach the minutes I took
to satisfy your curiosity until then.

--brian

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Meeting minutes 12/8/97

15:30	- intro and schedule chatter
	- introducing our new co-chairs and how this works
	- review of WG goals

15:35	- current status summary
	- current-practices is in 11th release
		- no significant changes since rev 10
	- 977bis is in 8th release
		- significant changes over last few months
			- i18n changes (UTF-8)
			- still issues to resolve
	- 3 proposed extensions (LIST, GET, SEARCH)
	- news and nntp URL draft submitted (new)
	- spam filter extension draft submitted (new)

15:45	- current practices draft
	- pt: What is a "moderated" group?
		- need to avoid 1036 covered items
	- pt: LIST extensions not fully detailed? site specific?
		- this is really a point about the "LIST MOTD, etc" draft
	- pt: how do existing implementations handle the difference in return codes between PERMISSION_DENIED and AUTH_REQUIRED?
		- do we have 2 or more implementations that do this? if so, let Stan know.

16:00	- 977bis
	- pt: group commands returns article ptr in an known state on an emtpy group.
		- need to clarify that response is "no article selected" error
	- pt: leading zeros in in response code?
		- this is carryover from 977
		- do we need to do anything?
		- must not generate, must accept
	- pt: timeout value in current draft?
		- it is now 3 mins
	- pt: why is nntp described as a "Usenet" protocol?
		- just drop it
	- pt: server logging of email addr
		- take this to the mailing list
	- pt: how does client get list of AUTHINFO mechanisms?
		- would like AUTHINFO to return list of mechanisms
		- Stan will talk to Chris Lewis
	- pt: need details on additional flags from LIST ACTIVE results
		- Stan will change the wording to indicate that flags are described in another doc (t aovid having to change core document)
	- pt: SLAVE is not in current draft
		- no objections to dropping it
		- drop it
	- pt: do we need a VERSION command?
		- drop it
	- pt: 977 only allows * and ! for LIST patterns?
		- no strong consensus to add a "!"
	- pt: WILDMAT in DISTRIBUTIONS
		- no consensus to add wildmat
	- pt: NEWNEWS issue
		- how are control messages handled?
			- take this to list
		- we'll keep it
	- pt: UTF-8 vs CHARSET issue?
		- defer until we come up with LANGUAGE extension or something
	- pt: WILDMAT support for UTF-8
		- problems in matching glyphs which have more than one UTF-8 sequence (more than one UCS-4 character point)
		- specific problems searching ranges (like [A-Z})
		- suggestions to map on character-per-character basis (not octets)
		- Stan will clarify this behavior in the doc
	- pt: time formats (UTC, GMT, etc) differ per command
		- DATE returns GMT
		- NEWGROUPS & NEWNEWS use local TZ (with UTC optional)
		- clients will send UTC but severs will accept both
	- pt: do we need a body type in response to BODY (MIME)?
		- this is a rathole
			- do we return mime-type, mime-version, structure, etc?
		- let's ignore this for now
	- pt: response length limit
		- do we use MIME 998-octet limit?
		- command limit is 512-octets
		- not sure if this is about response code lines or all responses (including body text)
		- take this to the mailing list
	- pt: how to handle \n and \t in OVER results?
		- convert to a single whitespace?
		- consensus to folding to single WS
	- pt: clarification of EXTENSION response
		- look at FTP extensions doc for similar thing
		- take this to the mailing list
	- pt: would like generic "security denied" return code
		- one code "AUTH_NEEDED" and one for "ACCESS_DENIED"
		- make sure these are applicable to GROUP response
		- any command may return these
	- pt: clarification of how to handle object user is not allowed to see
		- see above
		- client may not see information based on auth state
		- Stan will add clarification to document
	- pt: make sure to remove CHARSET references
		
	- pt: how do you handle changes in extensions list DUE TO authinfo
		- not subject to change due to auth state change
	- pt: could we put FAQ URL in a LIST NEWSGROUPS response?
		- not needed
		- if you want to put URLs in there, fine, but it's nothing special


17:20	- GET & LIST will be handled on mailing list
	- SEARCH
		- we will change name to SRCH
		- i18n will TDB based on 977bis
		- PAT TEXT into base doc?
			- mailing list
		- how do we find MIME structure?
			- you don't (rat hole)
		- how to search for non-existant headers