ietf-nntp HDR

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Sat Dec 29 07:35:58 PST 2001


Charles Lindsey said:
> P50. S9.5.3.1 (HDR)
> There is a definite Bug here, and possibly some confusion also.
> 
> Suppose I am in group comp.foo, and ask for "HDR Subject 49". It gives me
> 	221 Subject fields follow
> 	49 This is a subject
> Now suppose I am in group comp.foo, and ask for "HDR Subject <1234 at bar.com>",
> where the article requested is _not_ in that group (hence no meaningful
> article number can be provided). It doesn't say what is supposed to be
> returned. I can envisage two possibilities:
> 	0 This is a subject
> 	<1234 at bar.com> This is a subject
> Giving '0' would accord with similar situations elswehere in the draft.

The only comparable situation is ARTICLE/HEAD/BODY/STAT. In this case we
return an article number of 0, whether or not the article is in the current
group.

See also the last paragraph of 9.1:

  Article numbers MUST lie between 1 and [...] In some situations, the
  value zero replaces an article number to show some special situation.

> Giving <1234 at bar.com> is what the model implementation actually does with
> XHDR.

Cringe.

> The example at P51-2 is plain wrong (it tries to give an article
> number in the current group). I think I prefer the '0', but we need to
> decide on something.

I vote for consistency with ARTICLE.

> OTOH, there is a 412 response provided for "No newsgroup selected". That
> is fine when you gave a range parameter, but is ridiculous when you gave a
> <message-id> parameter. So it should be explained that there is no error in
> that case, and the example at P52+11 should be removed. I am sure we have
> discussed this matter before, but I do not recall the conclusion reached.

Again, I vote for consistency with ARTICLE. Look at how that's formatted:
the two syntaxes are given as separate lines and, more importantly, with
separate lists of response codes.

Incidentally, what's wrong with making the range optional and having it
return data for the current article ? This would require a 420 code to be
added.

However, now I think some more, I recall something. Did we say that this
command could work for any header ? Or is it intended to work from the
overview database ? In the latter case, it does make sense to have a 412
response to the message-id form, and it does make sense for the article
number to be included in the response. This would not be consistent with
ARTICLE, of course.

One final point: is "0-" (or "0-999") a valid range ? It's used in an
example.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:  +44 20 8371 1138
Internet Expert     | Home:  <clive at davros.org>  | Fax:  +44 20 8371 4037
Demon Internet      | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Mobile: +44 7973 377646
Thus plc            |                            |



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