Subject: rE: Message IDs and moderators

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 12:03:13 -0800 (PST)

Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>When sending proto-articles around
>to moderators, no Netnews article has yet been created.

A proto-article is an article. At the least, it is an RFC2822 message.

>An unknown amount
>of interaction between the moderator and the poster will occur before the
>message is actually sent,

Usually "none" covers the amount before the message is injected, but it is
sent the second the author sends it.

>Again, consider the RISKS digest, which is a very
>illustrative corner case of the sort of thing that can happen to a
>submission to a moderated group.

RISKS Digest is a particularly poor illustration since the Digest is a 
digest of a MAILING list which is distributed by moderated newsgroup. 
Further, each article in that group is posted by the RISKS digest author, 
and the headers of each article clearly represent that.

>From the perspective of the protocol, nothing in the protocol breaks if
>the moderator changes the message ID.  I know this from a practical basis:
>many moderators do this now and Usenet still works.

Agree. Cancels must be delayed until the article arrives at the poster's
site, but if the poster is cancelling an unapproved forgery he'd have
to wait anyway.

>I'm being a bit hard-nosed here about saying "if you don't like it, maybe
>my draft isn't for you" because this is typical of multiple changes I made
>to remove remaining best-practice requirements from the protocol draft and
>that was one of the significant philosophical differences I have with the
>existing USEPRO.

We already have a problem with an editor that makes unilateral changes to 
the draft(s) and ignores consensus. If using this draft means that certain
things are not negotiable, then I change my vote in the straw poll.

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:58:22 -0800

>> When sending proto-articles around to moderators, no Netnews article
>> has yet been created.

> A proto-article is an article. At the least, it is an RFC2822 message.

If we go with the definitions in my draft, a proto-article is not an
article.  There is an intentionally sharp distinction between a
proto-article and an article.  A proto-article only becomes an article
once it has been injected.

The forwarding to a moderator may or may not be an RFC 2822 message.
That's the common case on Usenet right now, but we're talking about (and
standardizing) any Netnews system.  For many stand-alone hierarchies, a
moderation submission will never travel via e-mail at all; it will be
stored in a local database of some sort for approval by a moderator.  And
even if it does travel by e-mail, the RFC 2822 message may simply contain
the submission as a sub-part, meaning that the message ID of the mail
message is irrelevant to the submission itself.

>> Again, consider the RISKS digest, which is a very illustrative corner
>> case of the sort of thing that can happen to a submission to a
>> moderated group.

> digest of a MAILING list which is distributed by moderated
> newsgroup. Further, each article in that group is posted by the RISKS
> digest author, and the headers of each article clearly represent that.

I think RISKS Digest is an excellent example of a corner case.  We need to
make sure that our standard is not incompatible with what people do in
practice, including the corner cases, where those cases are accepted.  A
moderated group does not necessarily have a one-to-one correspondance
between messages from a poster and messages injected into the group, and
we can't therefore require that the message ID be retained in all cases.

We *could* say something more complex, namely that the message ID SHOULD
be retained in cases where there's a one-to-one correspondance, but I
still think this is a best-practice topic.  (And I realize that this is a
change from what I'd said way back when we first discussed this topic; it
was a change resulting from reading through the entire draft and writing
my own draft.)

>> I'm being a bit hard-nosed here about saying "if you don't like it,
>> maybe my draft isn't for you" because this is typical of multiple
>> changes I made to remove remaining best-practice requirements from the
>> protocol draft and that was one of the significant philosophical
>> differences I have with the existing USEPRO.

> We already have a problem with an editor that makes unilateral changes
> to the draft(s) and ignores consensus. If using this draft means that
> certain things are not negotiable, then I change my vote in the straw
> poll.

I think this is a misunderstanding about what my draft represents.

Should my draft be adopted as a new starting point by the working group,
any changes subsequent to that should not be made unilaterally and will
not be made unilaterally by me, but only as the result of working group
discussion.

However, in the initial rewrite that I did, I made many unilateral
changes.  That's why the document has my name on it, not "ietf".  It is my
document, not a working group document, and it expresses my opinion.  The
purpose of this initial discussion is to decide whether that document is a
better starting point than the current USEPRO document for further working
group work.  If mine is adopted and issued as the new official USEPRO
document, then from that point forward full working group change control
should be exerted over any change.  But as long as the document is my
personal draft, with my name on it, yes, I will make unilateral changes
because that's the whole point of the exercise.

If the draft becomes the working group document, then I will abide by
working group consensus even if I disagree.  If some change is so
egregiously bad in my opinion that I cannot live with it, I may resign any
formal role in the working group, but I won't say you can't use the text.
But one of the goals of this process of comparing two different starting
points is to determine which philosophy to use as the foundation of the
draft, which is why I'm making very clear what changes are incidental and
what changes express that different philosophy.  Adopting my draft but
then changing all the philosophical differences back to Charles's draft
makes no sense; if we're going to do that, we should proceed with
Charles's draft and use mine only as interesting input.

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

---

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:36:19 +0100

> once it has been injected.

The definition in our finished "usefor" document is:

1.5 Definitions

An "article" is the unit of Netnews, analogous to an [RFC2822]
"message". A "proto-article" is one that has not yet been injected
into the news system. In contrast to an "article", a "proto-article"
may lack some mandatory header fields.

A "message identifier" (Section 3.1.3) is a unique identifier for an
article, usually supplied by the "user agent" that posted it or,
failing that, by the "news server". It distinguishes the article
from every other article ever posted anywhere. Articles with the
same message identifier are treated as if they are the same article
regardless of any differences in the body or header fields.

Note that it says nothing about whether or not a message-id can identify 
a proto-article.

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 15:19:24 GMT

>Charles's draft and use mine only as interesting input.

I think that is a fair summary of the situation, and these issues of
philosophy need to be discussed.

Indeed, I shall have a lot to say on that subject presently, but I chose
to start with a list of pure protocol issues, because I had to start
somewhere, and it makes no sense for the WG to discuss all the topics that
need discussing simultaneously.

-- 
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: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 15:19:24 GMT

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 15:15:13 GMT

>site, but if the poster is cancelling an unapproved forgery he'd have

But please bear in mind that a person wanting to cancel his own article in
a moderated group has to ask the moderator to do it for him, because the
normal protocol will send his cancel to the moderator in the usual way.

But supposing he wants to issue the cancel moments after he has posted it
(2nd thoughts, glaring typo to be fixed, whatever), then he can only send
it using the original Message-ID. That will surely confuse the moderator.

The whole problem with Usenet, which is quite unlike any other IETF
protocol, is that interoperability means more than getting the articles
correctly from A to B. It is a complete system (an "adhocratic anarchy" as
someone wrote in our earlier drafts) that works, but only if numerous
rules which go beyond the normal ideas of IETF "interoperability" are
observed.

So, for Usenet, saying "nothing in the protocol breaks if X happens" is
not always an overriding argument.