Subject: Re: #1047 Path field delimiters and syntax - status

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 12:18:23 -0700 (PDT)

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>Provided use of ':' is limited to IPv6Addresses only, I believe our view
>is that the number of problems will be acceptably low (but we need to
>point out the danger of using "dead", "beef", etc.).

We can either solve the problem altogether or argue about what value of 
"low" is "acceptably low". Why not just solve the problem altogether? 
There is no immutable reason that colons must be allowed as anything but 
separators. There is already a proposal on the table for how to deal with 
IPv6 addresses that solves the dead::beef problem. Why is it not used?

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>Yes, IP addresses will occur in Path. They already do (v4), and any system 
>that doesn't pass on articles that contain them is so broken that it's got 
>no business passing itself off as an USENET server.

Let's see if I understand your position correctly. The PATH header is 
intended to prevent dups from wasting time and resources, so any server
that passes them on is causing harm to the net. But if one of the path 
identities happens to contain the string ":dead:beef:" and if one of the 
peers of this server is named "dead", then the server must ignore the 
rules about not passing dups on to its neighbors, otherwise it is "so 
broken that it's got no business passing itself off as a[n] USENET 
server."

Does that about cover it? "Here's your new USENET standard. It's double
plus good. Have a nice day."

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>However, having a different syntax for "identification names" and 
>"diagnostic names" is an additional complication which gives you no extra
>benefit (in particular, it does not affect the dead/beef problem, which is
>already present on account of the diagnostic usage).

Only if you adamantly demand that colons become anything other than a 
delimiter, which is not backwards compatible with existing servers. It is 
TRIVIAL to remove the problem. Why are we still arguing about this?

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 10:53:47 GMT

>IPv6 addresses that solves the dead::beef problem. Why is it not used?

There is a standard notation for writing both IPv4- and IPv6-addresses,
and the world will not thank us for not using them (cf. the resistance to
the IPv6 notation introduced by RFC 2821). So it is a choice of requiring
the world to use a non-standard IPv6 notation (which it might not do in
spite of what we write) or of accepting the small risk that some sites
might try to use barewords such as "dead" and "beef", which old
implementations might do strange things with.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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