[NNTP] RFCs

[Russ Allbery]

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

> In case nobody noticed, our RFCs are finally published!
> So what happens now?

Well, here are the things that ideally should happen next, in roughly the
order that I'd like to try to work on them.  The amount of time I'm going
to have available is very much up in the air at the moment.

 * Implement the new standard more broadly.  In particular, I want to
   bring INN in compliance with the new standard fully.  This is a fair
   amount of work, several months of concentrated programming at the
   least, so given development resources right now it's going to take a
   while.

 * Start gathering implementation information for a move to draft
   standard, which of course requires that there be implementation
   information to gather.  I had a grand idea of putting together a more
   comprehensive guide to NNTP based on the RFCs but adding known
   implementation variations and the other protocol extensions that
   haven't been standardized.  I'm not sure if I'll have time or not.

 * Return to the extensions that we discussed but didn't implement in the
   first round.  In particular, we put off dealing with large article
   numbers and XPAT, and I'm still undecided on whether it would be worth
   writing an informational RFC on the XBATCH extension.

Between all of that, I do want to put more work into the article format
standard, since it's now considerably behind NNTP.

My feeling is that what really should happen now is largely development
and implementation work so that we can put the standard into practice and
see if we run into any problems.  Right now, the documents are a fair bit
ahead of what's deployed in the world.

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