[ietf-nntp] Need to start (and finish!) the SASL draft

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Wed Apr 21 06:39:05 PDT 2004


Russ Allbery said:
>> Would it be simpler to merge the SASL draft into the base document? I'm
>> happy to do the editorial work involved as part of producing draft 23
>> (which I'll need to do anyway).
> 
> One of the other things I was wondering about there is if we need to
> include STARTTLS as well.  We do if we want to document any sort of
> plain-text authentication, I think, so if we want to include the legacy
> AUTHINFO USER/PASS commands, we're going to need the TLS stuff in there.
> 
> I'm worried a little about how incredibly long our draft is already.  But
> I don't know if splitting at authentication and TLS is actually a useful
> split for implementors; probably not.

It also means, from the sound of it, that we'd have three documents coming
to fruition simultaneously, all dependent on each other.

I can see two sensible approaches:
(1) Merge SASL and TLS into the main document, as new sections within
section 8 (Extensions). The main document is 111 pages at present and
those two are 11 or 12 pages each, IIRC. However, there'd be savings from
removal of duplicate boilerplate, so I expect we'd end up with about
120-125 pages in total.

(2) Split *all* the extensions into a second document ("core NNTP
extensions"). This would drop about 20 pages from the main document, while
the second document would be about 40 pages long in total.

With either of those we could also merge in Jeffrey's streaming extension.
That would add another 4 pages or so.

My vote would be for option (2) - it feels architecturally neater. But I am
very happy to do all the integration and editorial work for either option.
Your call.

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