At 12:14 29/03/99 -0600, Richard Shockey wrote:
>>>The only kind of mechanism that can degrade gracefully from fully-connected
>>to intermittently-connected cases is one that performs (or can perform)
>>message store-and-forward.
>>That is the concept behind SMTP if extended to Session Mode.
That may be so. But I wasn't thinking of that when I wrote that.
(Actually, I was thinking of possibly using IPP as a transfer mechanism
to/from a message store. But, my purpose here is not to discuss solutions,
but requirements, so that's equally irrelevant.)
>>A corollary of this is that if IPP is to used then it will not, of itself,
>>address the needs of intermittently connected users. (This doesn't mean
>>that they cannot be addressed by additional future developments.) So maybe
>>the choice is really: do we defer consideration of intermittently
>>connected users as a later problem, or do we relax the goals in some way to
>>include them in the current work?
>>Intermittently connected users are served by RFC2305+ now, its just that
>the nature of SMTP beast means you cannot do some things that need to be
>done to achieve reliable transmission with our goals in mind. The needs of
>some intermittent users may be served by IPP gateway services, its just how
>far do we go down that road.
Indeed. But some of the discussion on this list to which I was responding
also concerned intermittently-connected users. I was trying to present
some issues without taking a position.
In particular, I was trying to raise the question of whether any additional
functionality of QUALDOCS that is not addressed by RFC2532, etc., should be
made accessible to these intermittently-connected users.
#g
------------
Graham Klyne
(GK at ACM.ORG)