Re: Unhappy with the complexity of pop-imap-downgrade

--On Wednesday, February 08, 2012 19:54 +0900 "\"Martin J.
Dürst\"" <duerst <at> it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:

> On 2012/02/08 1:55, John C Klensin wrote:
>> <hat=co-chair>
> 
>> Please remember that our target is still to have the set of
>> POP-IMAP documents in the hands of the IESG well before the
>> Paris IETF so, if you are going to write, write quickly.  That
>> said, I don't know that there would be a big problem handling
>> additional scenarios/protocol specifications as individual
>> submissions if that were necessary.
> 
> Quick question: Is downgrade an integral part of the POP-IMAP
> documents set, or could it be treated as a separate thing, so
> that the main POP and IMAP documents could move ahead even if
> we have to take some more time with downgrade?

Your quick question doesn't have a quick answer.  It would
almost certainly be possible to restructure the POP and IMAP
documents to make a downgrade model (very broadly construed and
probably including the explicit "there is a message here that
you can't read" possibility that John Levine and I have been
poking at) a future task.  Whether the IETF Last Call and the
IESG would let us get away with that is a different question --
the IETF has often, but not always, been uncomfortable with
situations that require transitions but where the documents come
with no plan or discussion of a strategy.

In addition and even more important, the WG has so far assumed
that some sort of plan is needed to deal with the case of a
delivery MTA that accepts SMTPUTF8 messages but that something
between there and the user can't handle them.   I think it might
be hard to get consensus in the WG to walk away from that
position although, if there were enough interest, we could ask
the question (while remembering that the IETF community might
push back and at least require a thorough analysis if not a
protocol).

Speaking personally, I'd also hope the WG would ask the question
as to whether "POP and IMAP now; downgrade after we take some
more time" would actually buy anything.  Remembering that our
target isn't to get documents published but to get systems and
capabilities deployed, unless there was evidence that there were
important actors who would deploy without these
post-delivery-MTA issues being resolved by the WG, splitting
downgrade handling into a separate, later, task might actually
result in a longer time before deployment occurred (because we'd
have to spend time revising and reviewing the POP and IMAP
documents to deal with the change rather than focusing that
energy on getting the downgrading model resolved.

    john

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