Raphael Hertzog <hert...@debian.org> writes: > On Mon, 30 Mar 2009, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> If so, that seems like a bad design; I wonder if we can just fix that >> instead. Sorry, I withdraw this completely -- I didn't think it through. This creates the same problem in a different way. > Unknown fields are ignored (and warned) unless you prefix them with some > X[BCS] to precise your intent (you indicate that those are unknown fields > that you want). > Keeping the X- prefix when copying fields would mean we could never > invent new fields without forcing a mass rename of fields once they are > official. Or we could not add official fields if we use an old dpkg-dev. Indeed, that's a serious problem. I believe this patch should be rejected and behavior left as-is, with users not told to add an extra X- to their fields. Conflicts can be dealt with as they come up. RFC 822 used this same X- convention. It is now widely recognized in the e-mail standards community that it was a horrible idea that never should have been introduced. I'm fairly sure that if the IETF had it to do over again, they would not introduce X- fields. They turn out to cause way more problems than they solve, force mass-renamings of fields once they become official, and result in X-* headers persisting as quasi-standards without ever being fully standardized because they can't be standardized with the X-* prefix. The general feeling in the e-mail community is that it's better to deal with the occasional collisions with user-defined fields and force everyone into the same namespace, possibly with a supporting registry so that people running experiments can reserve the header and there's some documentation for what people have used the header for in the past. The use of a separate namespace for experimental or user-defined fields just confuses matters without much benefit. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
