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

ned+ietf-nntp at innosoft.com ned+ietf-nntp at innosoft.com
Tue Jan 1 13:40:18 PST 2002


> 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
> :-) .

AFAIK they are not reclaimed in practice.

> > 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.

Highly unlikely. Very substantive experience with extension registration in
other protocols has not shown this to be a problem in practice.

> 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.

On the contrary, the essence of such a scheme is that the string will then be
reused in an incompatible way. If this doesn't happen there is no justification
for ever removing anything from the registry, and hence no justification for
provisional registrations.

It is one thing to do this with port numbers, which in addition to being
plentiful have limited builtin semantics. It is quite another to do this with
protocol element.

> 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.

I fail to see how provisional registrations would address, or would have
addressed, this particular problem.

				Ned



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