Subject: [dispatch] Maturity level of NNTP and Netnews-related RFCs

From: Julien ÉLIE <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2016 16:01:42 +0100

Hi all,

I think that RFCs related to NNTP and Netnews can be good candidates to 
advance from Proposed Standards to Internet Standards.

NNTP
   - RFC 3977 "Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)"
   - RFC 4642 "Using TLS with NNTP"
   - RFC 4643 "NNTP Extension for Authentication"
   - RFC 4644 "NNTP Extension for Streaming Feeds"
   - RFC 6048 "NNTP Additions to LIST Command"

Netnews Article Format
   - RFC 5536 "Netnews Article Format"
   - RFC 5537 "Netnews Architecture and Protocols"

Netnews URI Schemes
   - RFC 5538 "The 'news' and 'nntp' URI Schemes"

Are obsolete RFCs also candidates to Internet Standards?  (They once 
were widely-implemented standards at their time; I mean RFCs 850, 977, 
1036, 1849.)

Regarding the criteria given in Section 2.2 of RFC 6410 "Reducing the 
Standards Track to Two Maturity Levels":

(1) Examples of two independent interoperating implementations with 
widespread deployment and successful operational experience:

Examples of news servers implementing NNTPv2 (RFC 3977) and related 
extensions:
o INN (InterNetNews) https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/
o private news servers like Giganews (news.giganews.com)

Examples of news clients implementing NNTPv2 (RFC 3977) and related 
extensions:
o tin http://www.tin.org/
o Gnus, the Emacs newsreader http://www.gnus.org/
o Python library https://docs.python.org/3/library/nntplib.html

(2) There are no errata against the specification that would cause a new 
implementation to fail to interoperate with deployed ones.

Hmmm, maybe:
o erratum 4468 in RFC 5537? (but I am unsure it is an interoperability 
failure; non-compliant messages sent by ancient versions of a few news 
clients are rejected by compliant news servers)
o erratum 4708 in RFC 5538? (very minor)

Though RFC 3977 has lots of errata, I don't think they would cause 
interoperability failures.  They should be considered more than wording 
improvements and consistency than interoperability failures.

(3) There are no unused features in the specification that greatly 
increase implementation complexity.

Not that I am aware of.

(4) If the technology required to implement the specification requires 
patented or otherwise controlled technology, then the set of 
implementations must demonstrate at least two independent, separate and 
successful uses of the licensing process.

Not applicable.

Could you please tell me if my proposal to make the above RFCs as 
Internet Standards is receivable, and if that is the case, how to proceed?

Thanks,

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with
   me. » (Sigmund Freud)

---

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2016 18:34:07 -0500

> advance from Proposed Standards to Internet Standards.

One snag here has traditionally been that there are lots of
prerequisites (normative references) that are still at PS.  The major
ones here are the MIME specs (2045 and 2047) and base64 (4648).

One possible solution to that is to invoke RFC 3967 and say that these
are reasonable downrefs because they're stable and mature... but 3967
is clear that in such a case, using downrefs is not the right answer,
and instead the downrefs should be progressed first.

To that end, there've been a couple of attempts to start pushing the
whole batch of SMTP (RFC 5321), message format (RFC 5322), MIME (RFCs
2045 thru 2049), and several others up to IS, enabling others batches
such as NNTP to go afterward.  See the aborted YAM working group for
one such attempt.

RFCs 5321 and 5322 are really the linchpins for this; we'd need to
start with those.

Barry

> Are obsolete RFCs also candidates to Internet Standards?  (They once were
> widely-implemented standards at their time; I mean RFCs 850, 977, 1036,
> 1849.)
>
>
>
> (3) There are no unused features in the specification that greatly increase
> implementation complexity.
>
> Not that I am aware of.
>
>
> patented or otherwise controlled technology, then the set of implementations
> must demonstrate at least two independent, separate and successful uses of
> the licensing process.
>
> Not applicable.
>
>
>
>
> Could you please tell me if my proposal to make the above RFCs as Internet
> Standards is receivable, and if that is the case, how to proceed?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Julien ÉLIE
>
> _______________________________________________
> dispatch mailing list
> [email-masked]
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