INTERNET-DRAFT                               Charles H. Lindsey
Usenet Format Working Group                  University of Manchester
                                             July 2001

8.8.1. Duties of an Outgoing Gateway

8.8.1.  Duties of an Outgoing Gateway
   From the perspective of Netnews, an outgoing gateway is just a
   special type of reading agent. The exact nature of what the outgoing
   gateway will need to do to articles depends on the medium to which
   the articles are being gated. The operation of the outgoing gateway
   is only subject to additional constraints in the presence of one or
   more corresponding incoming gateways back from that medium to
   Netnews, since this opens the possibility of loops.

   It is recommended, however, that the following practices be followed
   by all outgoing gateways regardless of whether there is known to be a
   related incoming gateway, both as a precautionary measure and as a
   guideline to quality of implementation.

   1. Only the minimal necessary changes should be made, as stated
      above.

   2. The message identifier of the news article should be preserved if
      at all possible, preferably as or within the corresponding unique
      identifier of the other medium, but if not at least as a comment
      in the message. This helps greatly with preventing loops.

   3. The Date of the news article should also be preserved if possible,
      for similar reasons.

   4. The message should be tagged in some way so as to prevent its
      reinjection into Netnews. This may be impossible to do without
      knowledge of potential incoming gateways, but it is better to try
      to provide some indication even if not successful; at the least, a
      human-readable indication that the article should not be gated
      back to Netnews can help locate a human problem.

   5. News control messages should not be gated to another medium unless
      they would somehow be meaningful in that medium.

Diffs to previous draft

--- {draft-04}	Wed Jul 11 21:56:18 2001
+++ {draft-05}	Wed Jul 11 21:56:18 2001
@@ -12,8 +12,6 @@
    related incoming gateway, both as a precautionary measure and as a
    guideline to quality of implementation.
 
-
-
    1. Only the minimal necessary changes should be made, as stated
       above.