ietf-nntp Where are we at?

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

> You could allow
>     HDR all
>     HDR overview
>     HDR
> where the last case would imply "we implement HDR, but will not, or
> cannot say exactly which headers".

That's at least a bit better.  Okay, I can support that, tentatively.

> But I think all known present implementations would be able to respond
> with either the first or the second.

Nope.

>> This is not correct.

> Why not? Is a given server implementation going to change the list of
> header that it supports dynamically?

Yes.

> Surely not.

Why not?

It's a database.  What's wrong with adding new things to it on the fly?
It's becoming increasingly common to put a variety of headers into an
overview-like database but only provide the expected ones via the XOVER
commands to reduce overview download times and answer XHDR and XPAT out of
the full database.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>