Draft:  draft-ietf-nntpext-base-27
Reviewer: Spencer Dawkins [spencer@mcsr-labs.org]
Date: Sunday 6/19/2005 7:17 AM CST

Summary:  Still ready for publication as a Proposed Standard. The only change I 
saw from 26 was the addition of a note to the RFC Editor and one 
additional example in A.2.


Summary of -26 review comments:

> Intended status: Proposed Standard
>
> Background for those on the CC list, who may be unaware of GenART:
> GenART is the Area Review Team for the General Area of the IETF.  We
> advise the General Area Director (i.e. the IETF/IESG chair) by
> providing more in depth reviews than he could do himself of 
> documents
> that come up for final decision in IESG telechat.  I was selected
> as the GenART member to review this document.  Below is my review,
> which was written specifically with an eye to the GenART process, 
> but
> since I believe that it will be useful to have these comments more
> widely distributed, others outside the GenART group are being 
> copied.
>
> Sigh... I don't see my previous review in the reviewer spreadsheet, 
> but it was referenced in the ID tracker for this version of the 
> draft, so I'm forwarding it with a note...
>
> More than a year ago, I said "ready for publication as a Proposed 
> Standard ... probably ready to be published as Historic, too". At 
> the very least, the abstract paragraph I pointed to has been badly 
> overtaken by the entire HTTP thing, much less SIP and P2P protocols 
> like BitTorrent:
>
>>   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.
>
> I happened to like this draft a year ago. I'm sure it could be 
> improved further, but the only standards-track RFC for NTTP is RFC 
> 977, dated 1986 (yes, there is a "common extensions" RFC 2980, dated 
> 2000, but it's Informational). The 00 draft is dated 1997, and that 
> means it's been around the IETF as long as I have.  I've got to 
> believe that the NNTP community has long since moved on without 
> waiting for an RFC (please tell me they didn't wait eight years to 
> implement).
>
> (Does the Internet really need this kind of quality control?)
>
> Spencer
>
> p.s. "Grandfather, was NNTP ever used for anything except marketing 
> porn in random newsgroups?"
>
> From: "Spencer Dawkins" <spencer@mcsr-labs.org>
> To: <gen-art@alvestrand.no>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 9:47 PM
> Subject: Low-impact review of draft-ietf-nntpext-base-22
>
>
>> 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!
>