Subject: Re: #1313 Newsgroups and reserved characters

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2006 11:59:43 -0700 (PDT)

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

I wrote:

>>I see no "SHOULD NOT" in that paragraph. I see a clear MUST NOT.

>There are current proposals, elsewhere in this thread, to replace that 2nd
>MUST by something like

>   "SHOULD NOT be rejected by news servers on that account [alone]".

I don't care what proposals say, I am talking about the current text,
and specifically the part:

>>   <component>s beginning with "+" and "-" are reserved for private use
>>   and MUST NOT be generated by user agents (whether in
>>   header fields or in newgroup control messages [I-D.ietf-usefor-
>>   usepro]) without a private prior agreement to do so.

A user agent author is either going to ignore this command completely, or
will assume that the poster knows of an existing "private prior agreement"
when he commands the agent to create a followup, and thus will create a
newsgroups header field by copying the contents of a followup-to that has
a component beginning with '+' or '-'.

Since nothing is done any differently because of this demand, and 
everything "works OK" even if it is ignored, this MUST NOT is another
example of misapplication of RFC2119 mandates.

Justify the MUST NOT or get rid of it.

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 13:06:12 GMT

>and specifically the part:

There is not much point in your taking part in a discussion if you are
going to ignore all the proposed changes that have been made and merely
continue to rant about the unmodified text which people have already
agreed needs to be changed.

>a component beginning with '+' or '-'.

I would imagine that a poster who was a party to such a "private
agreement" would have configured his user agent to indicate that was a
valid group.

But, FWIW, I would have no strong objection if someone wants to demote
that first MUST NOT to SHOULD NOT.

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