[NNTP] RE: Last Call: 'Network News Transfer Protocol' to Proposed Standard

[Charles Lindsey]

In <courier.42938128.0000186C at mail.verisignlabs.com> "Scott Hollenbeck" <sah at 428cobrajet.net> writes:

>The IESG has received a last call comment that raises a question about the
>status of RFC 2980 and the proposed new NNTP base specification.  2980 is
>currently listed as an informative reference in draft-ietf-nntpext-base-26.
>Is the new base spec supposed to obsolete 2980?

I think RFC 2980 should remain for people who still want to use those
features (for sure, we could declare some of them like STREAMING, to be
obsoleted by the new drafts).

Anybody who continues to use these features will probably want to include
them in the CAPABILITIES response. It is pretty obvious what the correct
keyword to use should be (and for using XHDR, XOVER and XPAT as keywords
there is no need for formal action anyway because they begin with 'X').

So I think RFC 2980 should just be left there as a marginal anomaly that
causes no actual harm.

I do not think it would be a good idea to write a new draft to supersede
it, because then we would be forced to look seriously at XPAT. We decided
before that XPAT was a can of worms that we did not want to get bogged
down with, and I think that still remains the case. Someday, someone will
come up with a brand new clean command to do that job - if somebody does,
then an Experimental protocol would be the way to do it.

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