ietf-nntp Where are we at?

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylvg7zv18h.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>I have a hard time imagining this scenario.  After you want more than a
>few headers, it's quicker and more efficient to just download the article
>headers with HEAD and do it yourself.  It's certainly preferred by the
>news server administrator in most cases.

It is not likely that you will want to examine many headers, but you may
want to examine some particular header for a very large number of
articles. For example, you are filtering against some particular spam or
hipcrime flood and you have discovered that there is some feature in some
obscure header that positivley identifies the target articles. You would
prefer to use a HDR command rather than download headers for all articles
in the group.

>> We invented the LIST EXTENSION command precisely so that clients could
>> plan ahead which strategies to use. It is there. Why not use it?

>Because it's very complicated to specify this information in that format,
>and involves potentially listing dozens of headers as arguments to the
>extension, all for something that's likely to be almost never used since
>for all normal operations just trying it and seeing if you get 503 is
>easier and requires less parsing.

My proposal is not limited to the particular syntax I gave. Even if you
limit the possible parameters to the two common cases of "all" and
"overview" you will get most of the benefit.

But specifying the parameter is no burden on the implementor because, for
any given server, it is just a constant string that the implementor has to
write just once. Any possible complication lies in the client software
that is interested in using the information, which should therefore be
willing to parse and recognize whatever string is provided.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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