Re: ietf-nntp Thoughts on renaming X commands

["William H. Magill" <[e-mail]>]

>   If you are saying that we need to do this so that all the existing 
>   implementations can claim compliance, then I have to speculate about 
>   the purpose of the doing this work in the first place.

Some 3am museings...

I think part of the problem here is that there was such a long hiatus
in any "official" work on news.

The distinction between what "really is" and what people "believe is", 
very quickly gets beyond the issue of what was true and tolerable several
years ago, and therefore makes all of these things "new" extensions.

Things which may or may not have been intended as "experimental" or 
"extensions" when initiated tend to loose that look and feel after a
couple of years of general usage.

Based on the discussions at LISA, I think that there is going to be
some rapid change in INN which will push many more things into this
category. News is probably going to become as much of a moving target as
HTML shortly. There are just a lot of things which don't work as people
"expect" them to work. That is to say people who haven't been running news
since a/b/c news days and have totally different frames of reference.

Should the protocol definition reflect the good ol'days which haven't
existed for quite some time, or what really is as they call it in the
healt care industry, "UCR" - Usual, Customary and Reasonable - practice.

Here at the University, news is now considered a mission critical resource.
All hell breaks loose when the server goes down, or when SPAM arrives, mass
cancellations occur, messages arrive more than 10 minutes after they are
posted, when their postings don't show up on foreign machines for hours or
days, etc. All are issues and expectations which didn't exist at this time 
last year.

People think that "moderated" means exclusive control by the moderator; that
"local groups" can't be posted to by people who aren't local, etc. All are
expectations which are based on frames of reference like LISTSERV and
Majordomo,  PC bulletin boards, and BBS services like AOL, Compuserve
Prodigy and the like. Very few people realize how wide-open, chaotic,
fragile, and un-reliable news really is.

Penn has embraced electronic communications very whole heartedly.
WWW/News/Electronic Mail are all integral parts of the way in which the
University now does business and is planning to do business in the future.

Class discussions are no longer limited to students physically on campus.
Classes are including people worldwide who are participating via electronic
links - primarly news and electronic mail.

More and more Administrative activities are conducted via secure web servers
- course registrations, transcript requests, grade reviews, etc.
The next application coming up will be on-line registration for Graduate
School Admission.

News is used to rapidly disseminate and discuss both the mundane -
pep-rally at 4pm - and the "cathartic" - a student was shot in an armed
robbery last week. 

18 months ago all this simply didn't exist. 

And don't forget MIME attachments... the latest "disk eater."

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill                          Senior Systems Administrator
Information Services and Computing (ISC)   University of Pennsylvania
Internet: [e-mail]             [e-mail]
          [e-mail]                 http://pobox.upenn.edu/~magill/