ietf-nntp "compliance" verus "administrative control"

[Richard Letts]

On Mon, 1 Dec 1997, Stan Barber wrote:

> It does strike me as reasonable to define a set of commands as
> "restrictable"  by administrative policy, but I don't think it is
> reasonable for all of them to be. 

I beieve that the standard should not define which commands are
restrictable; it is a deployment matter.

 a standard implementation implements the standard.

 If an administrator chooses to disable a functional part of the system
and make the system non-compliant then they have to justify it to their
users.

If a feature is required by a purchaser of news-serving software, but they
are unaware that they require it at the time of purchase and they then
complain that the software doesn't work with xyz-news to the company that
sold them the software, and the vendor of the news-server software says
'the standard say that part is optional' as their excuse then the
standards process has failed the purchaser of said software.

people who disable NEWNEWS in their server are making is purposefully
non-conformant, they only have to justify it to their customers.

Richard Letts
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