Re: [lemonade] Implementing drafts

[Cyrus Daboo <[e-mail]>]

Hi Alexey,

--On Friday, July 16, 2004 2:58 PM +0100 Alexey Melnikov 
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>> I don't think deployment of code by itself should freeze a draft -- if
>> there are substantial problems with it that appear after deployment,
>> these need to be addressed.  That doesn't appear to be the case here.
>
> I wrote a draft that tries to address this problem to some extend:
> http://www.melnikov.ca/mel/Drafts/draft-melnikov-imap-transitional-capa-0
> 0.txt
>
> (I've submitted it before July 12, but I am not sure if it gets
> published, as I forgot to add IPR disclosure text)
>
> The draft suggests a new convention for transient IMAP capabilities,
> which should be used until the document discribing an IMAP extension
> becomes RFC. For example, the transient capability for SASL-IR extension
> as defined in draft-siemborski-imap-sasl-initial-response-03.txt would be
> X-DRAFT-I03-SASL-IR, where 03 is the draft revision, "I" stands for
> individual submission.

While I think this is a good idea, I think we could get by with a less 
formal approach. Specifically it should be left up to individual drafts to 
define the capability string for implementations of that specific draft, 
whilst also indicating what the final (RFC) capability string is expected 
to be.

So for example, the following text (which would be used in the final RFC 
version):

'The ANNOTATEMORE extension is present in any IMAP4 [RFC3501] 
implementation which returns "ANNOTATEMORE" as one of the supported 
capabilities in the CAPABILITY command response.'

Would become in the preceeding drafts:

'The ANNOTATEMORE extension is present in any IMAP4 [RFC3501] 
implementation which returns "ANNOTATEMORE" as one of the supported 
capabilities in the CAPABILITY command response. This capability string 
will be used when this draft is published as an RFC. Experimental 
implementations of this draft MUST use the capability response 
"X-ANNOTATEMORE-05", and MUST NOT use the capability response 
"ANNOTATEMORE".'

Even if we decide to stick with the formal approach, I think your draft 
should explicitly state that the final (RFC) capability MUST NOT be used, 
and should explicitly spell out what the capability string for the draft 
actually is, similar to the above text.


-- 
Cyrus Daboo