ietf-nntp NNTP and 16-bit charsets

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Mon Apr 30 04:07:54 PDT 2001


Russ Allbery said:
> Okay, that means I was definitely right and we need to go the same
> direction that RFC 3030 went for SMTP.  I've added this to the things to
> look at doing after we get this RFC out.  Basically, NNTP will need to
> introduce new commands for transferring binary articles, and while we're
> at it we can just specify the data length up front.

Except that SMTP involves pushing the data and NNTP often involves pulling
it (though there's a push as well).

I would implement it as:
    ARTICLE etc. have an extra parameter BINARY saying that binary is
      understood, combined with new responses (260/261/262) where the
      length comes before any other parameter
    POST, IHAVE etc. have an extra parameter BINARY saying that they
      want to send a binary article, combined with new responses
      (360/365) to say that a binary article may be sent.

[All the binary responses have 6 as the second digit instead of what it
would have been. Alternatively the last digit could be fiddled with.]

If you want detailed assistance on this, I'm happy to help.

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