Subject: draft-allbery-usefor-usepro-00 submitted

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2006 01:06:20 -0800

I've just submitted draft-allbery-usefor-usepro-00 to the I-D editor.  You
can also get a copy now from:

    <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/usefor/usepro/>

In that directory is the text draft, the HTML version of the draft, and
the original XML source.  I will keep that directory up to date if I
produce any additional versions of the draft.  I haven't had a chance to
wrap any nice HTML around it yet, or update my other pages about USEFOR
activities.

Charles is listed as the co-author because the text is heavily based on
his draft, uses large chunks of his writing, and has benefitted greatly
from the work that he has done.  Please note, however, that every decision
about what was included in this draft is solely my responsibility; please
do not assume that Charles supports its content or wording unless he
explicitly says so.  If you think something in the draft is wrong, I'm the
person to complain to.

This draft is not appreciably shorter and is still organized around
roughly the same lines, although I changed the order of some sections.
There are lots of minor changes to language, and I do not claim that
they're all for the better.  Many are an artifact of the process I used to
produce the draft; rather than editing the existing text, I started with
the current draft in another window and wrote a description of the same
protocol (with those changes that I felt should be made) in mostly my own
terms.  I did, however, freely copy from the existing draft if I felt that
it expressed a particular concept in a way that I liked, so you will see a
great deal of similarity of language.

I already commented separately on the technical changes that I made (and
there are probably others that I missed).  Here's a brief summary of the
editorial changes:

 * I tried to keep the document focused tightly on its scope and removed
   much discussion that I felt was outside its scope.  This includes most
   of the NOTEs; there are only a few places where I added a NOTE where
   there wasn't one previously, and many places where I removed a NOTE.  I
   tried to be very clear about what was within the scope of the protocol
   and what was not, and omitted discussion of areas that were not even if
   the discussion was interesting.

 * I tried to remove all references to policies, hierarchy administrators,
   and other terms for the organization of Usenet.  This is partly because
   I felt they were out of scope for the protocol and partly because I
   tried to make the document general to any Netnews network and avoid any
   statements specific or unique to Usenet.  Such matters can be discussed
   in USEAGE.

 * I attempted to remove mentions of constraints on agents that were not
   protocol constraints.  For example, my draft simply says that a
   moderator may do anything they like to a message; there is no mention
   of compliance with a moderation policy, since that's not part of the
   protocol.  From a protocol perspective, there are no restrictions on
   the actions of a moderator.

 * The Security Considerations section has been substantially modified.  I
   mostly rewrote it, although I think several paragraphs survive mostly
   unscathed.

 * There are numerous minor formatting changes and a few oddities of
   section organization that are due to use of xml2rfc.  For instance, I
   couldn't figure out a good way of putting the note to send comments on
   the draft to the WG somewhere more appropriate than the Scope, such as
   with the Authors' Addresses.  Much of this is probably due to my lack
   of fluency with xml2rfc.

 * I have not followed Charles's lead in the renaming of serving agents to
   storage agents; the former sounds more correct to me.

I'm not happy with the readability of the instructions for Path
construction.  Charles has a new version in his latest draft that may be
much better.  It may be even better to pull all Path discussion into a
separate section of its own (or a subsection of duties) and just reference
it from the duties sections of the specific agents.

I'm also not happy with the substantial duplication of instructions
between injecting, relaying, and serving agents and think that if we could
find a clean way of not repeating ourselves, we could shorten the draft by
several pages.

One other general note:  I have, over the past month, put in roughly 25
hours into this effort, which is a one-time expenditure that I can't
continue.  Going forward, I'm willing to devote one to two hours a week on
USEFOR but no more.  Anything that doesn't fit within that time is likely
to wait until the following week; I just have too many other committments
that I can't drop for USEFOR work.  I expect this is substantially less
time than Charles has put in, and as a result I expect I'll be
substantially less responsive than he has been.  WG participants (and
chairs) should bear that in mind when deciding on what role for which I
would be useful.  I'm willing to work on USEFOR-related work, but only
with that time constraint.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

---

From: Ken Murchison <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2006 11:17:07 -0500

>    with the Authors' Addresses.  Much of this is probably due to my lack

I'm not an xml2rfc expert either, but IIRC, you can add a <note 
title="foo"> section in the <front> of the document.

> find a clean way of not repeating ourselves, we could shorten the draft by

I'll take a look and see if I can come up with some kind of 
consolidation, although I'm not good at making miracles happen -- just 
ask my kids  ;)

> with that time constraint.

I would be able to find enough cycles to do editing on this draft if it 
moves forward.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison
Systems Programmer
Project Cyrus Developer/Maintainer
Carnegie Mellon University

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 19:40:44 GMT

>   statements specific or unique to Usenet.  Such matters can be discussed

May I just point out that the name of the WG includes the word "Usenet",
so defining how Usenet works is hardly off topic. And private
implementations of Netnews need administration just as much as the public
one. For sure, hierarchy administrators do exist (you and I are, or have
been, both involved in that) and Usenet would collapse without them. The
only oddity is that the method of establishing them is distinctly murky,
but in practice works remarkably well. And for sure, the protocols contain
features that assume they exist. Which is all USEPRO says, if you actually
read it carefully.

>   storage agents; the former sounds more correct to me.

I was just trying to avoid any possible confusion with news servers, a
term we now use widely in USEFOR.

>it from the duties sections of the specific agents.

My new version had been published on this List (twice).

>find a clean way of not repeating ourselves, we could shorten the draft by

Valid point, though there were often small but necessary differences of
detail.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: [email-masked]      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2006 10:35:40 -0800

Charles Lindsey <[email-masked]> writes:
> Russ Allbery <[email-masked]> writes:

> so defining how Usenet works is hardly off topic.

For USEAGE.  Not in my opinion, for the protocol, which is not specific to
Usenet.  As I say, this is one of those things that people can look at and
see which direction they prefer.

> And private implementations of Netnews need administration just as much
> as the public one. For sure, hierarchy administrators do exist (you and
> I are, or have been, both involved in that) and Usenet would collapse
> without them. The only oddity is that the method of establishing them is
> distinctly murky, but in practice works remarkably well. And for sure,
> the protocols contain features that assume they exist. Which is all
> USEPRO says, if you actually read it carefully.

Well, I dropped all of those references and didn't run into any problems
with features that assumed they existed, so at the protocol level I don't
agree.  The software and protocol are largely agnostic to how those things
are structured, which is what enables hierarchies to have so many very
different policies.

>> construction.  Charles has a new version in his latest draft that may
>> be much better.  It may be even better to pull all Path discussion into
>> a separate section of its own (or a subsection of duties) and just
>> reference it from the duties sections of the specific agents.

> My new version had been published on this List (twice).

Yes, and I've looked at it, and I'm still trying to decide what way feels
the best to me.  I had a limited amount of time to get the draft finished,
and this was one of the things that I didn't spend a lot of time on.  I
think we're all agreed, or nearly agreed, on what agents should do with
the Path header and it's just a matter of finding good wording, which
makes it less important to hash out immediately than the places where
there's disagreement.