ietf-nntp Comments on the November draft

[Andrew Gierth]

>>>>> "Clive" == Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

 >> NNTP operates over any reliable data stream 8-bit-wide
 >> channel.
 Clive> [...]

 Clive> Can we add something about streaming/pipelining here ? In
 Clive> other words, though the protocol requires the client to send
 Clive> commands and the server to respond, the client should be able
 Clive> to send further commands without having to wait for the server
 Clive> to respond to the previous command (providing, of course, that
 Clive> it gets the overall protocol correct). This may seem obvious,
 Clive> but see RFC 1854 for why it isn't.

Good point.

It may also be necessary or appropriate to specifically exclude some
commands from being pipelined; the obvious case is the MODE command.
(The IHAVE command has its own barrier to pipelining, but there's an
extension to deal with that, which I assume will be a matter for a
separate document.)

 >> A NNTP server MAY have an inactivity autologout timer. Such a
 >> timer MUST be of at least three minutes duration.  The receipt
 >> of any command from the client during that interval should
 >> suffice to reset the autologout timer.

 Clive> s/should/SHOULD/ or, even better, s/should/MUST/.

It seems that some clients are currently using the HELP command as a
no-operation to keep idle connections open.

Do we have anything to say about this practice?

 >> 9.4.8 OVER
 [...]
 Clive>     The content of any subsequent field is given by the
 Clive>     response to the LIST OVERVIEW.FMT command. A field may be
 Clive>     empty (in which case there will be two adjacent tabs, and
 Clive>     a sequence of trailing tabs may be omitted). Any sequence
 Clive>     of US-ASCII white-space or non-printing characters in a
 Clive>     field MUST be replaced by a single space.

  "Any sequence of US-ASCII non-printing characters in a field MUST be
  replaced by a single space."

(Collapsing sequences of space characters causes problems.)

-- 
Andrew.