Usenet RFCs finally published

Last month, after a rather extended AUTH48 period with a variety of different annoying holdups, the new Usenet (Netnews) RFCs were finally published, obsoleting RFC 1036. RFC 5536 is the new document describing the Netnews article format, and RFC 5537 is the new document describing the Netnews protocols. These join the RFCs for NNTP (3977, 4642, 4643, and 4644) as finally fairly completely describing a current Netnews implementation.

I was the document editor and author of much of the text in RFC 5537, based on earlier work by Charles Lindsey. Many thanks are due to Charles Lindsey, who was a co-author on both documents and who kept pushing to get them both published despite multiple roadblocks and delays.

There was originally supposed to be a third companion document that described best practices and recommended implementation strategies, but the working group long since ran out of steam for producing more work. Hopefully someone will pick it up, since a best practice document would be very good to have.

I've updated my Netnews article format and protocols web pages for the new RFC publication and to include the Internet-Drafts of son-of-1036, which is in the process of being published as a historical document. I also created a new reference page for Netnews-related standards and included copies of many of the most relevant e-mail standards there, since Netnews is now officially based on MIME and the most current e-mail standards.

It's been well over ten years since the document revision process started. USEFOR wasn't the longest-running IETF working group, but it was close. RFC 5537 holds an interesting distinction: it represents the largest numeric gap between one RFC and a subsequent obsoleting RFC (by a margin of only 1).

Posted: 2009-12-05 16:11 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04