Subject: Re: #1313 Newsgroups and reserved characters

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 12:25:49 -0700 (PDT)

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>>How does the user agent know if a "private prior agreement" exists?

>Because the server that created it (i.e. the NNTP server he connects to)
>should have told him.

More silliness. First, the server doesn't create private agreements, and 
second, the "user agent" isn't a "him" and I know of no standard mechanism
for one agent to tell another about any "private agreements" even if the
user agent was a "him".

>But is is mainly serving agents that will set up these private
>arrangements, not user agents.

Right. Sure. I don't want my serving agents running off creating "private
arangements" with other serving agents any more than I want my user
agents creating private arangements.

>>I've now seen the message where you explain why this paragraph is deemed
>>necessary. I'd challenge any software author to correctly deal with the
>>situation of a leaked experimental article that contains "Followup-To:
>>+test.me.please". His code is either going to generate a Newsgroups header
>>we tell him he MUST NOT, or he will be fastidious and refuse to do so,
>>even though the user just called Bob the Server Admin and got permission
>>to join the experiment.

>No, we told him he SHOULD NOT.

Nonsense. We say, quite clearly:

>   <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.  However, such
>   names MUST be accepted by news servers.

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

So, we are still stuck with a user agent that will, most likely, create
a Newsgroups header that we tell it it MUST NOT, because most authors
will simply ignore this section and do "the right thing" by copying
the Followup-To to the Newsgroups header field.

>If he inadvertently does, then it will be
>propagated if there are are further proper crossposts, otherwise it will
>only be accepted at sites where that group exists (i.e. those that are
>party to the "private arrangement"). That all seems OK to me.

A clearer argument for removing a specious MUST NOT is seldom heard. If
it is "all OK" when something we say MUST NOT happen happens, then we
are clearly using MUST NOT incorrectly.

Seth Breidbart <sethb@xxxxxxxxx>:

>The user agent asks the user: "You just generated an article to be
>posted in the newsgroup '+test.me.please'.  That name violates the
>RFCs unless there is a private agreement in place allowing it.  Do you
>want to Continue or Edit?: "

I seriously doubt any author is going to pay that much attention to this 
part of the standard and actually ask, and even if it did, my answer is "I 
pushed 'f', which is a clear and explicit instruction to you to create a 
followup. Don't ask me twice." And were I writing code to this standard, 
that is exactly how I would interpret the user's command.

In other words, I would do absolutely nothing different about a followup
going to +test.me.please than I would to any other group. That makes the
MUST NOT meaningless.

>Being a user agent, it's allowed to communicate with the user.

And similarly the user communicates with the user agent.

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2006 10:09:01 GMT

>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]".

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