ietf-nntp IANA extension registry (was: Commetns on draft-15.pdf)

[Charles Lindsey]

In <01KCIT2WL2Q6003WI0 at mauve.mrochek.com> ned+ietf-nntp at innosoft.com writes:

>> I think this may be a good idea, but I don't know enough about the IANA
>> registration process.  I think we need a consult with an AD on this point,
>> unless someone else in the WG knows something more about how this normally
>> works.

>IANA registration processes are done according to whatever procedure you
>define, so in theory there would be no problem with such a registry. That being
>said, the main problem that registrations seek to solve is conflicting use.
>Provisional registrations hurt rather than help in this regard, in that
>their entire purpose is to encourage reuse of a string with different
>syntax and semantics.

RFC 2434 sets out how to set up an IANA registry. One of the possibilities
allowed is for an Area Director (or more likely his nominated "expert") to
oversee cases where it is not possible to spell out every detail when the
registry is set up.

The only case I am aware of "provisional registration" is in port
numbers, which IANA seem willing to allocate to anyone who wants to
experiment with some new protocol. I don't know whether these are ever
deregistered if the experiment is later abandoned. But numbers are cheap
:-) .

>I don't believe any other application protocol has used a provisional
>registry. Are we so short of strings that we really need this?

Well we might be short of nice meaningful strings. I think the essence of
any form of "provisional" registration would have to be some mechanism for
dregistration for the ones that never make it. Perhaps after six months,
unless in the meantime there was at least an ietf draft in existence with
a view to an eventual RFC.

But there is certainly a real problem here, insofar as NNTP extensions
such as XOVER and XHDR are now widely used, yet in this group we are now
having to redefine them as OVER and HDR, and clearly the two are going to
run in parallel for quite some time.

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