ietf-nntp "Common NNTP Extensions" document updated

[Jon Ribbens]

Vincent Archer <Vincent.Archer at hsc.fr> wrote:
> > Why on earth do people want to do this anyway? It's an excellent way of
> > doing a pull-feed. Just because INN is broken doesn't mean that the spec
> > should be broken too.
> 
> Because obviously a lot of people disagree. As I said earlier, I prefer a
> RFC that reflects what is going on rather than one that insists on a vision
> of what the world *should* be when it's obvious that it is not what it
> *will* be.

I don't see that this is obvious at all. For a start, currently the situation
is that NEWNEWS *does* exist, and is in active use. Also, getting INN to
be better at NEWNEWS is not a particularly difficult job. I have offered
to do it myself, but I was advised to wait until some changes which are
currently underway in the overview system were finished.

> We do not want to remove NEWNEWS. Just to have the RFC not to mandate it
> for compliance, because then many NNTP sites will not be RFC-compliant, and
> once you've started down this road... why stop at one non-compliance?

That's fine if there is a good reason that a lot of people aren't going
to be compliant. In this case, there isn't. Removing a currently
mandatory command that existing software relies on is a pretty drastic
step.

Cheers


Jon
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