Subject: Re: precedence field and mailing lists

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 12:27:24 -0600 (MDT)

I've recombined these because they have an important connection, the
notion that the pronouncements of ITU, ANSI, IEEE, ATM Forum, the WAP
consortium, and the IETF are somehow necessarily better than those of any
other arbitrary group of people.

> From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

> > However, I've suddenly realized that the fault for some of the vacation
> > messages rests with the people running this list.  Notice that they
> > are not including a "Precedence: bulk" or "Precedence: bulk" lines
> > which tell at least some `vacation` programs to do the obvious.  
>
> nor should they.  Precedence is not a standard header field, and it's
> used in so many different ways by different pieces of software
> (to do everything from setting queueing priority to telling peered
> mailing lists not to forward the message) that it's better to omit it.

None of those sound like bad things for IETF lists, except when
intentionally overridden by people running their own software.

Despite IETF snobbery, Precedence: has decades of use.  It has defects as
a vacation program tamer, but those would be better fixed by coming up
with a replacement than by ignoring the problem.  IETF effort on that
would be better spent than on some (but not all) of the newest SMTP
elaborations.

> > In other words, the IETF itself is not above some standads bending..
>
> what standard are you referring to?

How about hoping that X-Loop will be preserved by those peered mailing
lists and other gateways and so prevent loops?

(I'm adding a Precedence: bulk to this to see what the IETF reflector
does with it.)

    ....

] From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

] nothing that AOL does on its own is standard.  to use the term "standard"
] in that way is to make the term meaningless.
> ...

In ancient days, there was a group of people, probably smaller than the
group now at AOL designing and implementing their protocols, who came up
with some protocols.  Those old protocols were explicitly ad hoc or at
least unofficial.  They were documented with informal and semi-formal
documents that really asked for comments, unlike any "real" standard,
including those from the IETF.  After more than a dozen years of guerilla
war, those de facto protocols clobbered the official, de jure protocols.
As usually happens, as they won the revolution, many of the revolutionaries
moved into the deposed overlords' offices and accepted fealty from the
toadies, go-ers, empire builders, and courtiers of the old regime, and
things went back to normal.

My point is that in rational eyes, a blessing from the ITU in Switzerland
or the IESG is neither necessary nor always sufficent to make a standard.
A standard is what http://www.m-w.com/ says, "something established by
authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example."

I'd rather that AOL took outside comments on their standards, but they're
still standards, no more or less than the latest embrace-and-extend brain
fart incompletely described in RFC format from the Pacific Northwest.
AOL's standards are not non-proprietary, open, or sanctioned by the IETF,
but they're as much standards as the greats on which the IETF bases its
existence.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Doug Royer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 12:24:54 -0700

> Despite IETF snobbery,  has decades of use.  It has defects as

Could you please point me at the standards (or otherwise) documents
that describe the semantics of 'Precedence:'?  It sounds interesting
but I just can't seem to find out what you mean or expect it to do.
And do you happen to know the name of the standards body that
approved that standard? Perhaps I can find it that way.

> lists and other gateways and so prevent loops?

FYI: X-<anything> is by definition - not standard header.

> ..

Something can be 'standard' and never used by anyone. Something can be
used by everyone and never a 'standard'. 

However the word 'standard' does not mean 'used by a bigger number of
people'.

> still standards.

Please point me at those standards. Or did you mean undocumented
protocols? Or did you mean documented and not public protocols?

> no more or less than the latest embrace-and-extend brain

I think the standard definition of standard includes, approved,
reviewed, and publicly available.

-Doug

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 17:50:17 -0400

> other arbitrary group of people.

none of these is an 'arbitrary' group of people.  the thing that makes one
group different from another, and potentially impacts the quality of
that group's work, is the kinds of people that each group attracts -
their talents, their values, their kinds of expertise, their culture,
and their ability to work together to acheive common goals.

> Despite IETF snobbery, Precedence: has decades of use.  

Precedence has decades of *varying* and "conflicting* use.  
That's not a result of IETF snobbery, that's a result of poor
design in the first place and, subsequently, several instances 
of J. Random email hacker deciding (incorrectly), in absence 
of any published definition of the Precedence field, that 
Precedence already did more-or-less what he/she wanted and 
there was no need to define a new field that did the right thing.

> It has defects as
> with a replacement than by ignoring the problem.  

you don't need a 'replacement' header field to keep vacation from 
replying.  all you have to do is not send an auto-reply when the 
recipient's address doesn't appear in the To or Cc header field. 

> lists and other gateways and so prevent loops?

fine with me.  but I don't see what this has to do with the IETF list.

As for the drivel about AOL proprietary protocols being standards:
You can act like Humpty Dumpty if you want to, but don't pretend 
that anyone else is going to listen.

Keith