ietf-nntp Standardization of LIST OVERVIEW.FMT

[Russ Allbery]

Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:
> Clive D W Feather <clive at on-the-train.demon.co.uk> writes:

>> Current text for OVER (and HDR refers to it):

>>     For all fields, the value is processed by first removing all CRLF
>>     pairs (that is, undoing any folding and removing the terminating
>>     CRLF) and then replacing each remaining NUL, TAB, LF, or CR with a
>>     single space (for example, CR LF LF TAB will become two spaces).

>> There is an issue to be resolved, here. In the generic stuff about
>> article formats, which in turn was derived from the specification for
>> multiline responses, we've said that there MUST NOT be any NUL, lone
>> CR, or lone LF in the article. Given that, TAB is the only thing that
>> needs converting.

>> So do I simplify this text or do we need to change the multiline
>> response text?

> Hm.  Does NNTP itself have any trouble with LF without CR or CR without
> LF, or is that inherited from the underlying article format?  I know INN
> accepts and handles those messages reasonably well (and there are quite
> a few of them out there floating around).

Oh, also, I'd really like to leave that in there if possible even if we're
restricting what can go into the article.  Someday that restriction might
be lifted in some circumstances or another, and it would be great if
everyone's overview code, or at least most of it, just worked.  It can be
a note or a recommendation or something if that works better, but I'd hate
to not include that hint to implementors since it's easy enough to do.

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