ietf-nntp DEBUG command x9x (was: 9xx)

[Russ Allbery]

Chin Chee-Kai <cheekai at SoftML.net> writes:

> It's good to be reminded from time to time if discussions have gone off
> track.  Help me out here, we doing "gcc -g -Wall ..."  to debug RFC977,
> or "gcc -O2 ..." to optimize WG output here?

Heh.  :)  My goal at this point is to do what I can to get the RFC
actually out and published, and I consider it more important to do that
than to fix all of the problems in the protocol.  Given Brian's comments,
I'm not *too* worried about remaining totally faithful to RFC 977, but
going beyond RFC 977 plus existing practice probably shouldn't happen.

> The continuation mechanism discussed is not "more than one type of
> multiline response" -- it is one mechanism to introduce multi-line
> *protocol* response, which up till draft-10, is still a single line
> thingie messed up with some data response on the same physical line at
> times (e.g. GROUP).

Right, I understand.  But we can't change any of that because everything
that's ever spoken NNTP uses it; my gut feeling is that adding multiline
protocol response is a change on the order of "we're creating a new
protocol" and if we end up creating a new protocol, it's probably better
to just use IMAP (see early mailing list discussion on this topic).

I think NNTP hasn't replaced IMAP because of its inherent simplicity and
installed base, so any changes that add fundamentally new features are
probably not a good idea.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but if there's no multi-line protocol 
> response, then our debugging information MUST NOT (RFC style) be
> more than 497 bytes in all for all responses.

No, because debugging information is outside the scope of the draft anyway
(it requires negotiation between the client and server), so you can also
agree on a longer line length.

> I'm not saying that the discussed multi-line protocol response should be
> in this upcoming draft, but I do think there's a vacuum generated if the
> WG comes to consensus to remove the DEBUG command.

I just really haven't seen anything in practice using these capabilities.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>