Errors-to: owner-drums@CS.UTK.EDU
Message-Id: <199505301342.PAA06159@dale.uninett.no>
From: Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
To: Eric Thomas <ERIC@SEARN.SUNET.SE>
cc: drums@CS.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: getting started
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 30 May 1995 13:48:57 +0200." <199505301214.IAA22394@CS.UTK.EDU>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Date: Tue, 30 May 1995 15:42:14 +0200
Sender: hta@dale.uninett.no

Eric,

> All in all this business of having  10+ year old RFCs that get updated by
> new RFCs from time  to time is a big source  of trouble. Implementors and
> support people need a single document  with all the edits applied, with a
> clear mechanism  to find  out whether the  document has  been superseded.
> Many companies are  getting into the Internet,  implementing 82x gateways
> without prior experience. They'll get 822 and implement it, and then when
> a customer whines  that one of the  change in 1123 isn't  in the product,
> they'll get confused  or upset and this is  generally counter productive.
> If you put  all the stuff in  one document life will be  much simpler for
> everyone.

I could not agree more - that is indeed why we chose to reject the
writing of "yet another applicability statement" and decided to take
the bull by the horns and rewrite the base documents.

About the hostname stuff: I think the new docs should clearly identify
that hostnames are legal DNS names, and leave it at that; it might
copy a few of the rules for reference (like the charset limitations),
but should otherwise refer to the DNS documents for the definition.
(the under_score allowed by BIND *is* a bug, IMHO.)
The legality of addresses like maryland.bitnet is a problem....let's
think some more about that when we see where it belongs in the spec.

                    Harald A