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

[Scott Hollenbeck]

Clive's option 2 seems like the right approach to me.  We would just need to
move the extensions document along with the base document (which should
reference the extensions document in appropriate places) so that reviewers
and implementers can get a complete picture.  It would also be necessary to
explain the relationship between any new extensions document and
Informational RFC 2980.  This approach is, however, inconsistent with this
WG's charter, which says:

"2. Include in the same document some reasonable group of existing commonly
used extensions forming a new base functionality for NNTP."

That text clearly describes a need to document some extensions in the base
spec.  Ned provided some other feedback to the IESG describing how we got
where we are that would be helpful to send to this list, but I'll leave that
to Ned (Ned, please forward your comments (or a summary) to the WG mailing
list or give me the OK to do it for you).

I'm still waiting for feedback from Steve Bellovin on Ned's comments.  We
_might_ not have to take very drastic document re-working steps at all.
Let's hold tight until I can get some more information from Steve.  He's
vacationing right now, so I hope to talk to him in the next week or so.

-Scott-

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Russ Allbery [mailto:rra at stanford.edu] 
> Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 2:25 PM
> To: Scott Hollenbeck
> Cc: ietf-nntp at academ.com
> Subject: How to organize the base NNTP draft
> 
> 
> 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/>
>