On 13 Apr 2023 01:15, Dan Ritter wrote:
zithro wrote:
On 12 Apr 2023 22:15, Greg Wooledge wrote:
RFCs are there for having a common ground, right ?
Sort of.
At various meetings, a grad student was "volunteered" to take
notes. Not quite certain of how accurately he had transcribed
things, he typed up "Request For Comments" at the top and sent
around copies.
The student was Jon Postel, right ? (RIP dude, you did us good !)
Since then, the IETF RFC Editor has established that some RFCs
are for noting what people are doing, some are for making
proposals, and some are "standards track" which are expected to
have compatible implementations.
I guess I wrongly think RFC are standards, whereas it's only a "work in
common" ?
But isn't the IETF "standardizing" protocols ? I mean it in ISO terms.
(playword by chance ^^).
If I'm not wrong, RFC compliance may even be required in some areas (via
contracts).
That might happen, but it wouldn't be a great idea from a legal
standpoint: RFCs are often ambiguous in surprising ways.
Oh, good to know. Do you have an example at hand ?
(I admit my memory lost the info about which RFC compliance I talked
about. Maybe some TCP/IP related stuff, and/or related to comms in space
? Or was it "just compliance" but not in legal terms ? Really don't
remember).
Like should I ignore all those non-standards stuff when setting it ?
Or should I handle them in the config ?
The surprising thing about the Internet is how well it works,
considering how many different interpretations people have
committed into code.
Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you receive ? (:
(the infamous Jon Postel quote, may be inaccurate as extracted from memory)
So I just use the usual software (postfix/dovecot), and should be good
to go ? No fear of loosing mails, either sending or receiving ?
(I'm only talking about the protocols themselves, not things like DNSBL,
spamhaus, etc).
