ietf-nntp proposed charter for nntpext wg

[Keith Moore]

The following charter has been proposed for the NNTP working group.
Comments are welcome; they should be submitted to this mailing
list and/or the Applications Area Directors.

thanks,

Keith

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NNTP Extensions (nntpext)
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 Chair(s):
     Erik Fair <fair at apple.com>

 Applications Area Director(s):
     Keith Moore  <moore+iesg at cs.utk.edu>
     Harald Alvestrand  <Harald.T.Alvestrand at uninett.no>

 Area Advisor
     Keith Moore  <moore+iesg at cs.utk.edu>

 Mailing lists:
     General Discussion:ietf-nntp at academ.com
     To Subscribe:      ietf-nntp-request at academ.com
     Archive:           http://www.academ.com/academ/nntp/ietf

Description of Working Group:

Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), defined in RFC 977, was released
to the world in March 1986. It was designed to do two things for the
"netnews" computer conferencing system:

1. Provide access to the netnews article database on a network server
   for "reader" client programs.

   The situation everyone wanted was access to netnews throughout a
   network, without having to actually run the netnews server software
   and keep a local copy of the article database (a sizeable resource
   commitment, even then).

2. Provide the means for interactive server to server article transfer
   over the Internet.

   The netnews system uses a "flood broadcast" mechanism to distribute
   articles to all sites, which as a consequence of its operation,
   creates many duplicate copies of any given article. These duplicates
   account for the netnews system's high reliability and speed in
   distributing articles, but they must be each eliminated at the
   receiving site, to avoid infinite replication.

Originally, netnews was developed by the UUCP Network community, and
used "batched" file transfer over modems and telephone lines to
transmit articles from site to site. This mechanism did not allow for
interrogating the remote system's database to see if the articles to
betransmitted were already at the destination (a common case). NNTP's
principal server to server article transfer mechanism allows for this
interrogation of the receiver, and thus saves both network bandwidth
and processing time on the remote.

Unfortunately, NNTP's original design had limitations which have become
apparent over the decade since its release. For example, NNTP's server
to server article transfer performance over the wide area Internet
suffers because there are at least two protocol round-trips per article
transfer, which does not allow two NNTP servers to continuously stream
the articles that must be transferred between them, and thereby make
full use of the available bandwidth (moderated by TCP's congestion
control mechanisms).

Also, a number of extensions to the protocol are now in common use (and
yet more have been proposed), but most such extensions are only
documented in the source code that implements them, or in associated
release notes - not in the NNTP standard. Such extensions would benefit
from IETF community review, and proper specification. Where there is
widespread interest in a particular kind of extension, the internet
user community would benefit from consensus among implementors prior to
deployment, as to the particulars of that extension.

The IETF NNTP extensions Working Group shall:

1. Revise and publish a standards-track successor to RFC 977 that
   removes ambiguities from the original document, defines a mechanism
   for adding extensions to the protocol, and provides a mechanism for
   the server to inform the client of the extensions which 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 presuming that
   proposals for extensions to the NNTP protocol have been submitted
   for consideration by IESG, the working group may be asked by the
   IESG Applications Area Directors to review one or more extensions
   for NNTP.

   Part of the purpose of such a review will be to test the newly
   established mechanism for adding protocol extensions.

The first concern of this working group shall be for the
interoperability of the various NNTP implementations, and therefore for
clear and explicit specification of the protocol. It is very important
that we document the existing situation before taking up any new work.

 Goals and Milestones:

   Jan 97       produce a revised internet-draft of the NNTP protocol

   Mar 97       submit the revised NNTP spec to the IESG for Proposed Standard
                status

   Mar 97       Begin review of accepted candidate extensions

   Apr 97       provide list of new extensions that should be considered to the
                IESG for charter update consideration