[ietf-nntp] How to organize the base NNTP draft

[Russ Allbery]

Scott, could you weigh in on this if you have any opinion?  We're debating
how best to handle the organization into documents of the various bits of
NNTP now that we need to include AUTHINFO SASL.

Currently, we have three separate documents (the base draft, a TLS draft,
and a SASL draft).  It's not entirely clear to me what the most useful
split for implementors would be, or if it would actually be more
convenient to just include all of this in one (large) single document.

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:
> 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.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>