ietf-nntp NNTP AUTH draft update

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylaeoblb2u.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>I don't have a particular constructive suggestion, just the observation
>that this seems to be more evidence that reserving a chunk of namespace
>for "private extensions" when the namespace is part of interoperability
>concerns is a bad idea in a lot of situations.  Things like this seem to
>always happen, where someone implements a good idea using private
>namespace, all the clients are modified to use that private namespace, and
>then we have all sorts of problems when we try to standardize it.

Well the logical conclusion from that idea is to remove the x8x response
from our draft entirely in section 4.1. That will at least stop the
problem arising in the future. People doing experimental things will then
have to try and fit in with the existing xyx structure as best they can,
or stick their necks out with a nonstandard one in the knowledge that they
are buying future incompatibility.

After that, you might then declare x8x for authentication as already
suggested, so long as no bad conseqences get reported in the next week or
so.

>Happens all the time with X- headers too, and is happening in NNTP with
>the various X* commands.

>I wonder if anything really would have broke if we'd just called the
>command OVER in the first place, rather than XOVER.

Well that is not so bad, because there are an infinite number of
possibilities to put after the X- that are guaranteed never to conflict
with official stuff.

And the problem is not so bad there because OVER and XOVER can continue to
co-exist in software without embarrassment.

But better not to have introduced OVER in the first place in case the
protocol gets slightly tweaked when it is eventually standardised. For
example, I pointed out a couple of days ago that it might be more
consistent for the new PAT command to have a comma-separated list of
wildmats rather than a space-separated one. You can easily make that sort
of change if people had only been using XPAT before.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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