Document: draft-ietf-nntpext-base-22.txt
Reviewer: Spencer Dawkins
Date: April 14, 2004

Summary - this document is ready for publication as a Proposed
Standard.

It's probably ready to be published as Historic, too. When I looked in
the potaroo.net archives and saw that the first version of this draft
was published in 1997, I knew I was in trouble. The abstract, which
has not changed since 1997, says

   The Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) has been in use in the
   Internet for a decade and remains one of the most popular protocols
   (by volume) in use today. This document is a replacement for RFC
977
   and officially updates the protocol specification. It clarifies
some
   vagueness in RFC 977, includes some new base functionality, and
   provides a specific mechanism to add standardized extensions to
NNTP.

I'm guessing that people who do NNTP have been working from the drafts
for the past seven years, and that no one outside the NNTP community
has read them during that time ("... one of the most popular protocols
(by volume) in use today" - really?).

I did see one strange stylistic thing - the use of 2119 MUSTs, etc.
for the specification itself, as in

   Commands
   in NNTP MUST consist of a keyword, which MAY be followed by one or
   more arguments.

If you can overlook stuff like this, it's probably fine to publish as
a Proposed Standard. It's very readable, seems well organized,
contains lots of examples, provides justification for choices, and is
unlikely to destroy the Internet. I wish all drafts had security
sections that show this degree of thought.

I'm really confused because version 22 is the first one that appears
in the ID tracker. How many times has the IESG seen this before
(probably before the ID tracker existed, right)?

Spencer, whose first IETF was the one AFTER the NNTPEXT BoF... and
this document existed before the BoF!