(0001335)
Don Cragun (manager)
2012-08-29 18:20
edited on: 2012-08-29 18:25
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Several criteria must be met before a new feature can be added to the
standard. These include, but might not be limited to:
1. one of the three member organizations of The Austin Group (The
Open Group, IEEE PASC, and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22) must sponsor the
addition,
2. the feature must have already been implemented,
3. the feature must fit into the scope of the standard,
4. copyright release for documentation of the feature to The Austin
Group's member organizations must be available,
5. the feature to be added must not be controversial (i.e., likely to
generate negative votes when trying to ballot a draft of the
standard that contains the new feature), and
6. must include documentation giving explicit editing instructions
describing all of the changes that would need to be made to the
current standard to add the new feature.
Since there are multiple, incompatible versions of netcat, any proposal
adding netcat would have to either just standardize the common subset of
netcat features that are supported by all current versions of netcat or
you would need to get the current maintainers of the various versons of
netcat to agree to a new common set of options, implement that new
utility, and document it. The proposal as presented in this bug report
implies that a new utility should be created with features from various
existing implementations of netcat. If this implication is true, there
is no existing implementation of the netcat that you want to appear in
the standard.
The proposal given in this bug report doesn't even come close to
specifying text changes needed to add this utility to the standard.
Since netcat is most frequently used when debugging system or network
administration problems (and system administration is out of scope for
this standard), it does not appear that this request meets point 3
above.
Since netcat has been used to hack into systems, there are concerns that
making this available on all standards conforming implementations could
create a security hole. Whether this is true or not, it is likely raise
objections to including netcat into a revision of the standard.
For all of the reasons above, this request is being rejected.
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