DRAFT minutes from the BOF

[Stan Barber]

DRAFT 2 -- NNTP BOF Minutes

Prepared by Stan Barber, with assistance from John W. Noerenberg

[Please see the slides for the original contents presented by Stan Barber.]

Stan Barber called the meeting to order and provided a basic agenda and
overview of RFC977 and work that had gone on before. He presented the original
description concerning this BOF and discussed a possible time line and 
deliverables should a working group be formed. These took the form of 
two documents. One would be a revisions of RFC 977 that would clarify
any ambiguities in the original document and provide a specific mechanism
to add standardized extensions in the future. There was some confusion
in the group concerning exactly what Stan meant by this. His intent was to
to establish both the mechanism of adding verbs for new standard extensions,
provide the server with a mechanism to inform the client about which extensions
(both standard and proprietary) it supports and suggest a mechanism for
establishing such extensions as standards from the IETF perspective. From
the discussion within the group, it appeared that there was a clear consensus
that providing a mechanism for the server to inform the client about which
extensions it supports was important. It was not clear that there was
consensus on the need to establish such extensions from the IETF perspective
and the mechanism for establishing such verbs was not significantly discussed.

Additionally, Keith Moore, one of the Applications Area Directors, expressed
his feelings that a revised RFC977 that did not include accepted current 
practice would probably not be acceptable to IESG and suggested that the two 
documents be merged into one. Stan said that he thought that using the second
document to prove out the extensions mechanism described in the first document
would lay a good foundation for future extensions work. There was not clear
consensus for either approach, but since Keith said the IESG would not accept
the document as proposed, Stan revised his proposal along the lines that Keith
suggested and said that perhaps other new extensions like free-text
searching, replication or streaming might be used as test cases to test the 
new extensions standardization mechanism. There was also some concern that
the IESG may not permit the formation of the working group due to concerns
that it may be hard to find consensus in the NNTP community. It was stressed
that that the charter should be clear and the amount of work have be limited
to realistically attainable goals.

Stan proposed that a draft document be published in mid August and discussion
about problems or revisions in the document be done on a new mailing list set
up as part of the WG creation process. Drafts would be updated to reflect
changes on which consensus had been reached and at the San Jose IETF, a
document could be voted on that might move onto the regular IETF standards
track. Keith said that would probably be a suitable approach, but it would
basically have to start at the beginning of the process and would not really
be advancing RFC977 as it currently exists. That would mean that interoperable
independent implementations of the new protocol would not necessarily have to
exist by December, but would need to exist by the IETF after that. The
Internet Software Consortium, NetScape, the "reference implementation" for Unix
and Microsoft are all interested in pursuing this process and so having
such multiple implementations at the appropriate time would not be a problem.

The group was asked if they felt there was a need to create a working group.
There was clear consensus that there was. The group was asked about whom
should be working group chair. Stan Barber volunteered, but Keith and Paul
Vixie both said that would rather Stan served as a document editor. As there
was no other candidate forthcoming at the meeting, this issue remained open.
Until it is resolved, Stan Barber will provide coordination for the group.

The charter of the working group would involve three goals:

	1.  Revise and publish a standards-track successor to RFC 977 
                that would remove ambiguities from the original document, add
		a mechanism for adding standards-track extensions to
		the protocol and providing a mechanism for the server
                to inform the client of which extensions it supports.
        2. Include in the same document some reasonable group of existing
                commonly used extensions forming a new base functionality
                for NNTP
        3. Upon completion of the RFC977 successor document and with the 
                approval of the Applications Area Directorate, select
                a new standards-track extension for NNTP and test the newly
                established mechanism for adding extensions.

A mailing list as been established for this work at ietf-nntp at academ.com.
Subscription to the list can be done by sending a regular internet-style
subsciption message to "ietf-nntp-request at academ.com". Archives of the
discussion are available at this URL: http://www.academ.com/academ/nntp/ietf
A general information page on this work is available at this URL:
	http://www.academ.com/academ/nntp/ietf.html

Other archive sites for the mailing list will be announced at a later date.

Respectfully submitted,


STAN BARBER

-- 
Stan   | Academ Consulting Services        |internet: sob at academ.com
Olan   | For more info on academ, see this |uucp: {mcsun|amdahl}!academ!sob
Barber | URL- http://www.academ.com/academ |Opinions expressed are only mine.