[NNTP] Fwd: Low-impact review of draft-ietf-nntpext-base-22

[Russ Allbery]

My reply is coming separately.


Reply-To: "Spencer Dawkins" <spencer at mcsr-labs.org>
From: "Spencer Dawkins" <spencer at mcsr-labs.org>
To: <gen-art at alvestrand.no>
Cc: "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net>,
        "Scott Hollenbeck" <sah at 428cobrajet.net>,
        "Ned Freed" <ned.freed at mrochek.com>, "Russ Allbery" <rra at stanford.edu>
Subject: Fw: Low-impact review of draft-ietf-nntpext-base-22
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 20:40:43 -0500

Intended status: Proposed Standard

Background for those on the CC list, who may be unaware of GenART:
GenART is the Area Review Team for the General Area of the IETF.  We
advise the General Area Director (i.e. the IETF/IESG chair) by
providing more in depth reviews than he could do himself of documents
that come up for final decision in IESG telechat.  I was selected
as the GenART member to review this document.  Below is my review,
which was written specifically with an eye to the GenART process, but
since I believe that it will be useful to have these comments more
widely distributed, others outside the GenART group are being copied.

Sigh... I don't see my previous review in the reviewer spreadsheet, 
but it was referenced in the ID tracker for this version of the draft, 
so I'm forwarding it with a note...

More than a year ago, I said "ready for publication as a Proposed 
Standard ... probably ready to be published as Historic, too". At the 
very least, the abstract paragraph I pointed to has been badly 
overtaken by the entire HTTP thing, much less SIP and P2P protocols 
like BitTorrent:

>   The Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) has been in use in the
>   Internet for a decade and remains one of the most popular 
> protocols
>   (by volume) in use today.

I happened to like this draft a year ago. I'm sure it could be 
improved further, but the only standards-track RFC for NTTP is RFC 
977, dated 1986 (yes, there is a "common extensions" RFC 2980, dated 
2000, but it's Informational). The 00 draft is dated 1997, and that 
means it's been around the IETF as long as I have.  I've got to 
believe that the NNTP community has long since moved on without 
waiting for an RFC (please tell me they didn't wait eight years to 
implement).

(Does the Internet really need this kind of quality control?)

Spencer

p.s. "Grandfather, was NNTP ever used for anything except marketing 
porn in random newsgroups?"

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <spencer at mcsr-labs.org>
To: <gen-art at alvestrand.no>
Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 9:47 PM
Subject: Low-impact review of draft-ietf-nntpext-base-22


> Summary - this document is ready for publication as a Proposed
> Standard.
>
> It's probably ready to be published as Historic, too. When I looked 
> in
> the potaroo.net archives and saw that the first version of this 
> draft
> was published in 1997, I knew I was in trouble. The abstract, which
> has not changed since 1997, says
>
>   The Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) has been in use in the
>   Internet for a decade and remains one of the most popular 
> protocols
>   (by volume) in use today. This document is a replacement for RFC
> 977
>   and officially updates the protocol specification. It clarifies
> some
>   vagueness in RFC 977, includes some new base functionality, and
>   provides a specific mechanism to add standardized extensions to
> NNTP.
>
> I'm guessing that people who do NNTP have been working from the 
> drafts
> for the past seven years, and that no one outside the NNTP community
> has read them during that time ("... one of the most popular 
> protocols
> (by volume) in use today" - really?).
>
> I did see one strange stylistic thing - the use of 2119 MUSTs, etc.
> for the specification itself, as in
>
>   Commands
>   in NNTP MUST consist of a keyword, which MAY be followed by one or
>   more arguments.
>
> If you can overlook stuff like this, it's probably fine to publish 
> as
> a Proposed Standard. It's very readable, seems well organized,
> contains lots of examples, provides justification for choices, and 
> is
> unlikely to destroy the Internet. I wish all drafts had security
> sections that show this degree of thought.
>
> I'm really confused because version 22 is the first one that appears
> in the ID tracker. How many times has the IESG seen this before
> (probably before the ID tracker existed, right)?
>
> Spencer, whose first IETF was the one AFTER the NNTPEXT BoF... and
> this document existed before the BoF! 

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