ietf-nntp Fwd: Pipelining...

[Russ Allbery]

Someone mentioned on news.software.nntp that our current draft uses the
term "streaming" for sending multiple commands without waiting for a
response, and that's confusing given that streaming is also used for the
MODE STREAM extension.  It looks like RFC 2920, which defines the same
thing for SMTP, calls it pipelining.  I think we should call it the same
to avoid any confusion.


From: pmrobinson at mail.com (Peter Robinson)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: Pipelining...
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 10:33:20 +0000

Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> wrote:

> Yeah, someone was confused.  Streaming (which is a different set of
> commands for transferring articles between peers) is something completely
> different than pipelining (which is sending multiple commands before
> waiting for a response from the server).

An understandable mistake IMHO.  Perhaps that someone read a recent IETF
NNTP draft.  The last one I read called it streaming:

|         Except where stated otherwise, a client MAY use streaming. 
|         That is, it may send a command before receiving the response 
|         for the previous command.

which is more than a bit confusing if you also read about MODE STREAM in
RFC 2980:

|MODE STREAM
|
|  MODE STREAM is used by a peer to indicate to the server that it would
|  like to suspend the lock step conversational nature of NNTP and send
|  commands in streams.

Although it does go on to say

|                        This command should be used before TAKETHIS and
|  CHECK.  See the section on the commands TAKETHIS and CHECK for more
|  details.

Pipelining is much clearer.

Peter