ietf-nntp Initial draft FINALLY available

[Ben Polk]

At 02:59 AM 9/30/96 CDT, Stan Barber wrote:
>I am delighted and relieved to announce that the first draft of the NNTP
>spec is now available

Great job Stan!

Here are some comments:

>4. Basic Operation.
>
>
>               Every NNTP session MUST involve the following steps,
>               though possibly not in this order:
>
>               CONNECTION
>               GREETING
>               CAPABILITIES DISCOVERY
>               AUTHENTICATION
>               NEWS TRANSFER
>               CONCLUSION
>               DISCONNECTION

This almost sounds like all these steps are required.  They shouldn't be.


>               Initially, the server host MUST start the NNTP service by
>               listening on TCP port 119.

Port 119 is the default, but it isn't required that the server listen there.

>6. Format for Keyword Descriptions
>
>               Each keyword is shown in upper case for clarity, although
>               case is ignored in the interpretation of commands by the
                    ^MUST be
>               NNTP server. 


>9.1 AUTHINFO

The AUTHINFO SIMPLE and AUTHINFO GENERIC commands are listed, but not the
plain (and widely used) AUTHINFO USER|PASS command.  Is this intentional?

>10.4.1 LIST
>               LIST [ACTIVE [wildmat]]

How widespread is the ability to specify wildmat patterns in the LIST
command?  I think it's the right thing to do, but I'm a little leery
of language that implies that it must be there when a lot of servers
don't support it.  

>            10.4.3 LIST DISTRIBUTIONS
>               LIST DISTRIBUTIONS
>
>               The distributions file is maintained by some news
>               transport systems to contain information about valid
>               values for the Distribution: line in a news article
>               header and about what the values mean.

This says "some news transport systems" support this.  So is it
required or not?  Or is it in the SHOULD category?  LIST DISTRIB.PATS
and LIST NEWSGROUPS have the same language.

Regarding the OVER command:
>               The sequence of fields
>               must be in this order: subject, author, date, message-id,
>               references, byte count, and line count. Other optional
>               fields may follow line count. Where no data exists, a
>               null field must be provided (i.e. the output will have
>               two tab characters adjacent to each other). Servers
>               should not output fields for articles that have been
>               removed since the overview database was created.

Hmmmm.  A couple of questions.  First, why is this command renamed from 
XOVER?  I'd like a crack at defining an all new OVER command that doesn't
suffer from the problems of XOVER.  Second, is the detailed listing
of the headers and their order as written here correct?  I thought
that this was controled by the OVERVIEW.FMT file.  But I guess I wouldn't
argue that the XOVER response should be variable, since so many clients 
assume exactly the response described here.


>            10.4.10 PAT
>               PAT header range|<message-id> pat [pat...]

Same question as with XOVER.  Are we really going to rename these X commands?

>            11.1 QUIT

>               If a client simply disconnects (or the connection times
>               out, or some other fault occurs), the server SHALL
>               gracefully cease its attempts to service the client.

How about adding: If a client wants to disconnect without sending the QUIT
command it MUST explicitly terminate the TCP/IP session on its end, it MUST
NOT simply abandon it.

>            12.4 NEWNEWS

Do we have to keep this?  It really doesn't work in a practical way in some 
of the widely used NNTP implementations.

>               7. the increment by which the extension is increasing the
>                 maximum length of the any commands over that specified
                                    ^typo
>                 in this document.

Where are XBATCH and XHDR?  Ah, I mean BATCH and HDR.  :)  I think they're 
pretty widely used these days.