Re: [sieve] SIEVE WG Status

[Alexey Melnikov <[e-mail]>]

Cyrus Daboo wrote:

> Hi folks,

Hi Cyrus,

> I wanted to give a status update of the WG and also ask a few 
> questions of everyone to see where we want to go. This comes at the 
> prompting of our new AD who wants to judge the "energy level" of this 
> WG to determine whether it makes sense for the WG to continue.
>
> Note that I did request a 1 hour session for the upcoming meeting in 
> Quebec City
>
> The last face-to-face WG meeting was last July. Since then the 
> following drafts have been through IETF processing and are now in the 
> RFC editor queue:
>
> draft-ietf-sieve-autoreply
> draft-ietf-sieve-external-lists
> draft-ietf-sieve-notify-presence

> draft-ietf-sieve-vacation-seconds

I think these drafts were past AUTH48 when I stopped them from being 
published (due to the reference to draft-ietf-sieve-external-lists). So 
the RFC Editor should be told that we want to review/fix examples before 
publishing.

> These should all be published soon (having mostly been blocked on 
> external-lists which was recently approved). Thanks to everyone for 
> their work on these.
>
> There has been a WG last call on the draft-ietf-sieve-include document 
> and an update to that will be available very shortly so that we can 
> continue with IETF processing of that.
>
> All our other drafts are currently expired. From our charter, here are 
> the outstanding items that have previous had drafts published:
>
>   (1) Finish work on existing in-progress Working Group documents:
>       (b) Notify SIP (draft-ietf-sieve-notify-sip-message)
>       (c) RegEx (draft-ietf-sieve-regex)
>       (e) Sieve in IMAP (draft-ietf-sieve-imap-sieve)
>
>   (2) Finalize and publish the following SIEVE extensions as proposed
>   standards:
>       (d) Convert messages (draft-melnikov-sieve-convert)

I am particularly interested in (c) and (e) at this point. I would 
really appreciate somebody showing interest in (b) and (d).

> Can the authors of these documents please provide a status update and 
> indicate whether they intend to continue work on them? Can we also 
> have other people comment on whether they intend to implement, or at 
> least review or help with, any of these drafts?
>
> If the WG does shut down, it seems reasonable for any of these drafts 
> to continue on as individual contributions.

Does our esteemed AD agree?

> At the very least, if we are going to continue work on them I would 
> like to see updates published in time for discussion at the IETF 
> meeting (July 11th cut-off for draft submission).
>
> We have a bunch of other items on our charter which I have listed 
> below with some of my own comments on what I think should happen with 
> them. Please comment on these yourselves so we can decide whether to 
> continue or drop these from the charter if we decide the WG should 
> continue on.
>
>   (3) Work on a specification for iCalendar and vCard extraction, and
>   cooperate with the VCARDDAV WG for address book tests in Sieve.
>
> I suspect I might have been one of the primary movers for this 
> particular topic, but at this point I don't it is relevant any more. 
> So I would be in favor of dropping this.

My idea behind this was to have a test that can reach inside XML body 
parts, possibly using XPath or similar.

>   (4) Work on a specification to describe how EAI/IDN issues should be
>   handled in SIEVE.
>
> We have periodically asked about this, and most of the time there 
> seemed very little that needed to be done in SIEVE to deal with this. 
> One option going forward is for the WG to drop this item in favor of 
> it being picked up in the EAI WG.

I declare this to be Pete's problem either way ;-).
Doing this in EAI would be fine.

>   (5) Work on a "Benefits of SIEVE" guide for client and server vendors
>  that:
>       (a) Describes the SIEVE protocol and its suite of extensions.
>       (b) Explains the benefits of server-side filtering in practical 
> terms.
>       (c) Shows how client-side filtering can be migrated to SIEVE.
>
> Whilst there was a lot of initial enthusiasm for this when we 
> originally did a re-charter, there has been no progress in developing 
> a document. At this point I would propose we drop this from the charter.

With some sadness, I have to agree.

>   (6) Produce one or more informational RFCs containing a set of test
>   scripts and test email messages that are to be filtered by the scripts,
>   and the expected results of that filtering. This will serve as the 
> basis
>   of a interoperability test suite to help determine the suitability of
>   moving the base specification and selected extensions to Draft status.
>
> Again there was initial enthusiasm for this, but nothing has 
> materialized, so I would also propose dropping this from the charter.

Right.

> Next question: does anyone have any new SIEVE work they would like to 
> propose at this time?
>
> I don't think anyone can deny this WG has been successful over the 
> years in addressing the needs of SIEVE implementations, even if at our 
> own, sometimes slow, pace. Shutting it down now would not be 
> unreasonable, but I think we do need to prove the utility of keeping 
> it alive. So please chime in with your thoughts.