Subject: Re: Ticket status, USEFOR

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 16:49:33 -0700 (PDT)

Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>This is not broken and there is no need to fix it. 

That is your opinion.

> As has been discussed
>many times before, a news standard necessarily imposes a number of extra
>constraints, beyond what RFC2822 demands. 

Of course it does. Nobody has said otherwise. Please respond to the 
point being made and not an irrelevant non-issue.

We've been quite honest about listing those differences in the section
dealing with the References header in USEFOR.  Nobody wanted to list this
as a difference, so it is a bit late to claim that obviously this is a
difference. We chose NOT to impose that constraint when we defined the
header field; don't tell me that it's normal to impose constraints that we
chose not to, or that we HAVE imposed constraints when we explicitely 
chose not to. (I suggested a simple change to the relevant section to 
solve the problem; it was dismissed. That's an explicit statement that the 
difference does not exist.)

We cannot have it both ways. Either it is optional or it is mandatory. 
USEFOR-05 says "see RFC2822", and RFC2822 says "optional". If USEPRO 
contradicts this, then USEPRO is wrong. I would have said that USEFOR was 
wrong, but consensus says it is right. Now I say "be consistent".