ietf-nntp Re: RFC 1036 Revision: General

[Andrew Gierth]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to news.admin.misc,news.software.nntp,news.software.readers as well.

>>>>> "Curt" == Curt Welch <curt at kcwc.com> writes:

 >> xhdr From <20000220110821.423$oq at newsreader.com>
 >> 221 0 From header of article <20000220110821.423$oq at newsreader.com>.
 >> <20000220110821.423$oq at newsreader.com> curt at kcwc.com (Curt Welch)
 >> .
 >> xpat From <20000220110821.423$oq at newsreader.com> *curt*
 >> 221 From matches follow.
 >> <20000220110821.423$oq at newsreader.com> curt at kcwc.com (Curt Welch)
 >> .

 Curt> Thanks.  I hope the NNTP draft gets that right.  It's stupid to
 Curt> try and return an article number.

The NNTP draft obviously doesn't specify XHDR & XPAT, but the example it
includes for PAT header <message-id> does show an article number being
returned:

        Example of a successful retrieval of header from an article by
        message-id

                    [S] 200 NNTP Service Ready

                    [C] PAT subject <i.am.a.test.article at nowhere.to>

                    [S] 221 Header information follows

                        3000345 I am just a test article

                        .


The relevent part of the text says:

        Successful responses start with a 221 response followed by
        article number, an US-ASCII space, and the header from that
        message in which the argument pattern matches the contents of
        the specified header line.

IMO there should be some change here to handle this case - either
allowing the returned article number to be '0', or having the message-id
returned instead as for INN's xhdr & xpat.

-- 
Andrew.