Forwarding bugs to the IETF

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+Forwarding bugs to the IETF
+
+<p>Sometimes following up on a bug takes you a lot further than you
+expected. <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/337041">Debian bug #337041</a>
+looked like it was going to be fairly straightforward once I upgraded
+coreutils to figure out what the
+<a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#mod">new IUTF8 flag</a>
+actually did, since the SSH2 protocol already supports transferring termios
+flags around.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, since IUTF8 is relatively new, it doesn't have a number
+assigned in the
+<a href="http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-secsh-connect-25.txt">
+draft connection protocol</a>. Moreover, that Internet-Draft is in the last
+stages before becoming an RFC and can't be modified any more, and it doesn't
+include any facility for private-use extensions. D'oh. To add further
+complication, since IUTF8 is Linux-specific, it's not hard to imagine that
+some other OS might introduce something with the same name but subtly
+different semantics, and so the SSH protocols can't just defer to POSIX for
+the definition but instead have to spell out exactly what they mean.</p>
+
+<p>As a result of all of this, it looks like the best way to make progress
+might be for me to write an I-D myself that creates a channel extension to
+set or clear IUTF8, and attempt to enlist support from some upstream
+implementors. I didn't expect bug triage to lead me into the Internet
+standardisation process quite so quickly!</p>