ietf-nntp OVER extension

[Charles Lindsey]

In <20011229152310.F93705 at demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>> 9.5.2.2 (OVER) defines 8 obligatory fields which MUST appear, in order, in
>> every overview line. 5 of these correspond to headers in the article, 3 of
>> them (article number, byte count, line count) do not. Question: are these
>> obligatory entries supposed to be included in the LIST OVERVIEW.FMT
>> output?

>My reading of the wording for OVER is that they are *not*; furthermore,
>they MUST NOT have the header name prepended. However, I agree that the
>wording is less than ideal (you have to look at the examples to be clear).

Andrew seems to think they *are*. Please will people report what their
servers actually DO with LIST OVERVIEW.FMT? (mine doesn't support it at
all).


>I think we need to be clear on what is *supposed* to happen. Once we know,
>it will be easy to write proper words.

>(1) Should LIST OVERVIEW.FMT include the 8 mandatory fields ?
     NO
>(2) If so, what are the names for the last two of the 8 ?
     Quite so, and also the first mandatory field (article number)
>(3) Can the mandatory fields have the header name prepended ?
     NO
>(4) Can any optional fields have the header name prepended ?
     YES
>(5) Must any optional fields have the header name prepended ?
     YES
>(6) In LIST OVERVIEW.FMT, should "full" have a space before it ?
     Pass.
     Anyway, I would rather remove "full" entirely if (5) is agreed. Could
     INN survive that?

But if (5) is agreed, then the whole LIST OVERVIEW.FMT command becomes
redundant, as Greg Andruk has said.

>> P48. S9.5.2.2
>> I am slightly surprised that the OVER command does not have a <message-id>
>> alternative (since all the other commands with a [range] parameter seem to
>> have one).

>The overview databases (as I understand it) are per-newsgroup. There is no
>easy way (without fetching the article) to map an ID to a newsgroup, so
>this version is not provided.

OK, that seems a good reason to leave it as-is.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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