ietf-nntp Currently outstanding issues

[Charles Lindsey]

In <87k7awn08j.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>For future extensions, I think we can probably require that people use X
>until they get some sort of document written, provided that we're good
>about accepting those documents.  The problem with requiring that things
>be standardized before they get "good" names is that if the
>standardization process is not responsive, people will just ignore it.  In
>the past, the NNTP standardization process has not been responsive.  Maybe
>we can improve that.

We went through this discussion on Usefor, and concluded that creating
X-headers for cases intended (hopefully) to become a permanent feature of
Usenet was a Bad Thing. Far better to use a non-X header that could be
standardized later. So there is some mealy-mouthed wording that says more
or less that.

However, in that case help is at hand, because Graham Klyne has a draft
for an IANA registry of header names, with provision for a "provisional"
registry for names which are not yet standardized, but for which some
written document exists, plus a known responsible person. This draft has
been to last call once, and it is high time it was finalized (is Graham
listening)?

So you could, I suppose, create a similar IANA Registry for NNTP commands.

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