ietf-nntp Comments on NNTP draft-04

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Fri Apr 17 08:49:09 PDT 1998


I have just read through this draft, and a have a few niggles and typos,
and one issue of substance. Note that I got taken off this mailing list
when my local postmaster started bouncing mail from the list to me,
and I have been too involved with the Usenet-format list to have time
getting back on to it again. So I may have missed some discussion on
these matters. I have now resubscribed.

Page 2. 2nd para. Should read
	"It also extends the newsgroup name matching ..."

Page 3. 2nd para. Should read
	"The client host and server host SHOULD then exchange ..."

Page 6. last para. Should read
	"... that the triglyph GMT may be present or omitted."

Page 10. 8.1.3 1st para. Should read
	"No list (not even an empty one) ..."

Page 13. 3rd para., concerning "SHALL insert a Sender: line". Obviously,
this should not be necessary if a proper Sender: line was already
present. Note that a user-supplied Sender: line (assuming its <address>
was acceptable) is to be preferred to a server-derived one; e.g.
	"Sender: Alice Jones <alice at foo.com> (Secratary to Joe Boss)"

Page 15. Extra blank lines seem to have appeared in bullet #3.

Page 23. 3rd para. It might be better to refer to "already-injected"
articles as opposed to "already-posted". That is the terminology we are
trying to establish for our Usenet-Format draft.

Page 25. 1st para. Should read
 "... by some news transport systems to contain information about when
 and who ..." (note two corrections in there).

Page 32. NEWNEWS Command.
There is no provision for saying, in your list of newsgroups
	...,comp.foo.*,!comp.foo.baz,...
This was permitted in RFC977 and is widely implemented (in INN
certainly). Moreover it gives useful functionality (it is tedious to
get the effect by other means, especially in view of the 512 character
command-line limit). Was this an oversight, or is it a deliberate
change? Note that the semantics would need to be clear about the order
in which the negated and non-negated groups were to be interpreted.

Also (bottom of same page) it says the NEWNEWS (and other) commands were
"discussed in an earlier part of this document". Where precisely did you
have in mind?

Page 36. Syntax of 'newsgroup'. It would be better to say
	newsgroup = wildmat
or even newsgroup = ["!"] wildmat

Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email:     chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk  Web:   http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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