Re: RFC2822bis, Message-IDs and USEFOR

Unless somehow a horde of people with lots of energy and competence 
appears on the mailing list, I'm not going to entertain proposals for 
reopening USEFOR.

Just finding the energy to call the question on the last outstanding 
USEPRO question is proving too much for these chairs.

             Harald

Charles Lindsey skrev:
> Because of some unfortunate properties of Message-IDs as defined in
> RFC2822, USEFOR contains some extremely ugly syntax so as to permit the
> greatest possible subset of what RFC2822 allows that will nevertheless
> work in Usenet. But the fact that it succeeds in doing just that does not
> make it any the less ugly  .
>
> We agreed way back that, when RFC2822 came up for revision, we should
> press for changes that would make it more Usenet-friendly.
>
> That revision has now taken place, and is on the verge of Last Call
> (draft-resnick-2822upd-06.txt). Frank and I have been campaigning
> throughout for suitable changes to be made, with occasional but useful
> assistance from Russ and Alexei, and, after much persistance, we have
> gained most of what we asked for (even more than I ever expected).
>
> So, RFC2882-bis changes the suntax of <msg-id> in three ways:
>    1. left of the ' <at> ', <no-fold-quote> is completely gone (leaving just
>       <dot-atom-text>)
>    2. right of the ' <at> ', <quoted-pair> has disappeared from
>       <no-fold-literal> (indeed, it is gone from <domain-literal> too)
>    3. NO-WS-CTL has also disappeared from <quoted-pair> (and from
>       <quoted-string> too)
>
> So, starting from USEFOR <msg-id> being a subset of the RFC2822 <msg-id>,
> it is now almost the other way around - we allow too much! The only
> remaining differences are that we still need to forbid '>', and we impose
> a 250 character limit on the overall length. And I decided not to push my
> luck any further by trying to fix those. I reckon we could live with them.
>
> So the question now arises of whether we should try to bring USEFOR into
> line. Granted that USEFOR has now passed its last call (even though not
> yet published as an RFC), it would be necessary for us to seek leave from
> the IESG to take it back for one further Draft (there is precedent for
> that, since it happened that way for the NNTP draft that is now RFC3977).
> I think the changes necessary are rather more than could be done at the
> final AUTH48 stage.
>
> The change that I would propose would simply be to remove that ugly syntax
> and replace it with something pretty close to what is in RFC2822-bis. The
> only differences needed would be to forbid '>' in <dtext> and to impose
> that 250 character limit, and to apply suitable word-smithing to bring
> everything else into line.
>
> We MIGHT go further by basing USEFOR as a whole on RFC2822-bis rather than
> on RFC2822. But we should make it clear before we embark on this exercise
> that NOTHING else is to be changed that does not arise directly from the
> RFC2822-bis changes. We have already achieved consensus on everything else
> in USEFOR, and I have no desire at all to change any of that.
>
> {The only other major difference between USEFOR and RFC2822 is that SP
> after ':' in headers. It soon became clear that they were not going to
> budge on that, although there was some support for a non-normative NOTE
> suggesting that such as SP was a good practice for reasons of
> interoperability with Usenet (and such a NOTE might yet get in).}
>
>