CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Eliot Lear/Intelligenetics NNTP Minutes There were three meetings of the Network News Transport Protocol Working Group. There was also an area meeting which included the NNTP, LIST, 822-EXT, and SMTP Chairs, along with the Area Director. This is to say, Eliot Lear, David Lippke, Greg Vaudreuil, and Russ Hobby. The following items were explored at the various meetings: 1. Differences Between Mail and News. We should consider moving towards a common user interface between mail and news. Similar message formats have made this possible in the past. With the advent of a new message format for mail, news will need to adopt some similar standard pretty quickly (ARE YOU READING THIS, NEWS READER PEOPLE?????). There was discussion of moving to unite the news and mail formats. While conceptually it sounds like a good thing, the details need to be kinked out, and the question needs to be discussed to death. Russ asked what a document be put out that describes the current news architecture. Erik Fair has volunteered to write that document. That document should almost certainly include a safe way to gateway news and mail. Conceivably another document will issue from the area recommending a course of action. 2. News Reader Capabilities. First, it was the consensus of the group that this topic is really part of the Charter of the NNTP group; we're just considering splitting new functionality into a separate protocol. The current version of the draft contains very little enhancements in the area of news reader capabilities. This is because the Chair does not have any real concrete language in front of him from what this group wants. The consensus, therefore, was to push on with the transport document,and explore further the reader issues, and in particular how this relates to Item 1. If we do produce an NNRP document, we must be careful that by its nature it would steer development away from useful areas (Ittai Hershman's paraphrased comments). In this vein, if we do produce a document, we should consider it an experimental effort rather than a standards track effort. Along the lines of a news reader protocol, Stan Barber brought along a one page shopping list of items he would like to see in a 1 reader protocol. We discussed how to define a search command so that it would be generally useful. Arguments for and against a specific syntax and mechanism were heard. 3. Authentication Theodore Tso is now the official ``stuckee'' for the SAAG in the NNTP Working Group. Issues of Common Authentication Technology (CAT) were discussed, particularly at the Thursday meeting. Text needs to be written into the document to take advantage of CAT. We are facing a problem with CAT because NNTP is one of the first protocols to use it. Currently CAT can only be used to access Kerberos and DEC SPX. Jeff Schiller suggested that a simple challenge/response method would be acceptable if someone did the footwork. Clear text, however, seemed to be right out, to the point where it was thought that the SAAG might hold things up. Jeff also discussed the evils of negotiating security methods. It turns out that some of the logic that was applied to mail standards can be applied to news. If we do, in fact, move the transport document to proposed standard, the impetus for authentication in the transport is greatly diminished. 4. Transporting Binary and Mixed Message Format. It turns out that simply adopting the mail standards as news standards may be a bit painful. With the introduction of binary, there needs to be a new canonical form. This in itself would be a minor irritation; however, the new mail format allows for mixed binary and text. This means that it could be necessary to switch between binary and text canonical forms in a single message. This makes transport a nightmare, and is a good argument for encoding. On the other hand, possibly the new binary canonical form might be able to handle the problems. Interested parties are URGED to read the draft mail documents and the archive of messages leading to their production. 5. CCITT Harri Salminen circulated a draft document that is CCITT's version of netnews. The document may be retrieved from nic.nordu.net, via anonymous FTP. Your comments are, of course, solicited. 6. Problems with the Current Document Several people have sent notes pointing out formatting problems, grammatical errors, and certain inconsistencies (like SIMPLE authentication descriptions). Please mail all such complaints directly to the Chair, and not to the list. It was the consensus of the group that the IMAGE and BINARY options be combined into a FORMAT option. Eliot Lear will write some text in to this effect. It was also agreed that the COMPRESSION and DATE commands would be removed, and that the NEWNEWS command be extended to deal with DATE's purpose (which is to say that NEWNEWS will both accept and deliver a cookie instead of a date). Text to 2 be written and argued. State diagrams need to be completed. Default behavior needs to be defined and mandated. We discussed eliminating the OPTION command. The problem with eliminating the OPTION command is that it gets hard to batch verbs, and we concluded that batching such things was a good idea. 7. Making the IETF lists available to the IETF via netnews. This issue was brought up both in the Working Group and in the area meeting. Some action is expected in this area Real Soon Now (tm). Social issues were discussed in the Wednesday meeting regarding the perceived stigma from which news suffers. 8. News MIB Russ Hobby stated that he would not require a News MIB from us. However, several people have indicated some interest in managing news objects, particularly Jim Thompson (not present at Atlanta). Jim should proceed to take comments and write up a document. One should be careful to study which functions are ubiquitous throughout the Internet, and which are implementation specific. 9. Timetable August 31, 1991 - We would like to see the NNTP document become an Internet Draft. All this does is expose the document to the Internet community. It can be changed from within the Working Group after that point. November, 1991 - Get architecture document out as an informational RFC. December, 1991 - After considering comments and making appropriate changes, let the NNTP document proceed to proposed standard. It is hoped that some code will be ready by December. 10. Multicasting Netnews Brief mention was made on a research effort under way to explore the possible use of multicast packets as a way for distribution of news. Interested parties should contact the Chair directly. 11. Next Meeting No next meeting date has been set as of yet. Depending on how we proceed with a news message format, we may meet at Interop (October). 12. General Information If you wish to be added to the ietf-nntp mailing list, you should send mail to ietf-nntp-request@turbo.bio.net. 3 Drafts and message archives can be gotten from turbo.bio.net via anonymous FTP in the ietf-nntp directory. The format of draft document filenames is documentname.format-type. Attendees Stan Barber Robert Enger enger@seka.scc.com Erik Fair fair@apple.com Ned Freed ned@innosoft.com Olafur Gudmundsson ogud@cs.umd.edu Ittai Hershman ittai@nis.ans.net Russ Hobby rdhobby@ucdavis.edu Neil Katin katin@eng.sun.com Eliot Lear lear@turbo.bio.net David Lippke lippke@utdallas.edu Joseph Malcom jmalcom@sura.net Chris Myers chris@wugate.wustl.edu Michael Patton map@lcs.mit.edu Mel Pleasant pleasant@hardees.rutgers.edu Jan Michael Rynning jmr@nada.kth.se Harri Salminen hks@funet.fi Theodore Tso Gregory Vaudreuil gvaudre@nri.reston.va.us 4