[NNTP] Working Group Closure

[Charles Lindsey]

In <courier.433941D5.00003DF5 at mail.verisignlabs.com> "Scott Hollenbeck" <sah at 428cobrajet.net> writes:

>That's my proposal.  Speak now if you feel the group should remain open.  If
>you do feel that the group should remain open, you should also explain how
>you will help to complete the work and contribute to work going forward.

I believe the most urgent piece of unfinished business is what to do about
overflowed article numbers. Opinions vary as to when this problem will
hit us - some predict as little as two years from now, but a more
realistic estimate would I think be six years, or more.

So if we start now, it should be possible to have a smooth transition
method in place by the time it is needed (but it should not be delayed any
further from now).

Therefore I suggest it might be sensible to recharter the WG specifically
to address this problem and to make proposals.

As to XPAT, which has also been mentioned, the problem there was that it
used wildmats, with their built-in anchoring at both ends - which is fine
when it is only newsgroup-names which need to be matched. I think we
agreed that wildmats were just not the right tool for this job, but it is
not clear what the substitute should be. I think it might be better to
leave that one until the nature of any future I18N becomes more apparent.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5