ietf-nntp Comments on the November draft

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Andrew Gierth said:
> It may also be necessary or appropriate to specifically exclude some
> commands from being pipelined; the obvious case is the MODE command.

Um, why ?

I made this commment in slightly different words, but to the best of my
ability to read the spec the MODE command does *nothing* other than produce
a response. If this is not the case, the spec badly needs rewriting.

> (The IHAVE command has its own barrier to pipelining,

As indeed does POST. I don't see that as a problem.

> 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?

I wouldn't have thought so. We can't prevent people doing it, though I
wouldn't particularly want to encourage it.

We don't have a NOOP command (something that I would have thought was a
good idea) but I don't know if the rules this group works under allows us
to look at adding one. And as I pointed out, we don't have *any* wording
about responses to unknown commands.

>  >> 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.)

Oh. Um:

    Any sequence of US-ASCII non-printing characters (including tab but
    excluding space) in a field MUST be replaced by a single space.

all right ?

Thought concerning Usefor's deliberations: are the contents supposed to be
returned before or after folding ? Before or after stripping of comments ?

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel: +44 20 8371 1138
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