ietf-nntp Standardization of LIST OVERVIEW.FMT

[Matthias Andree]

Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

> Do you have an opinion over which form of standardization?  (In other
> words, should the command only be implemented when the server can
> guarantee consistency for the whole overview database, or standardized in
> the current form?)  I'm guessing that requiring that it only be
> implemented when consistency can be guaranteed is a non-starter based on
> other information I'm getting about how clients are using the command
> right now, but I'd still be interested in gathering more opinions and
> preferences.

Well, the issue seems to be that "article does not have this header" and
"this header is not present in the overview" are indistinguishable on
the client side. How can this be addressed? One way is to introduce a
magic token to mark the header as "missing from overview" (say, a lone
question mark). This would however make OVER incompatible with current
XOVER implementations, and this should clearly be marked early in the
standard.

-- 
Matthias Andree