Reviewed NNTP drafts

I finished a thorough read of all of the current NNTP protocol draft and sent all of my comments to the mailing list. Now that I'm the working group co-chair, I really need to get to these sorts of tasks sooner than I did; that draft was published two weeks ago.

I think we're in really good shape. There are a few nits to clean up, and we have to decide whether to standardize LIST OVERVIEW.FMT, but other than that and a few more things to clean up, I think we're ready to publish. We should be able to make our working group deadline to finish next month, and then implementors can work from an accurate NNTP standard. Not complete yet, since we've not yet standardized streaming or authentication (those are the really big extensions to tackle next), but it will be a considerable improvement over RFC 977.

I also reviewed the first TLS draft and the discussion of it so far, and I think we've pretty much reached consensus on the issues identified so far. INN will need a little work to be compliant with it, but not too much, and it looks like the document will be tight and small and pretty straightforward. Those are the best kinds of standards. Jeffrey Vinocur has done an excellent job carrying that draft forward.