ietf-nntp HDR

[Charles Lindsey]

In <20011229153558.G93705 at demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:


>Charles Lindsey said:
>> 
>> 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.

ME TOO.

>> 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. ...

>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.

ME TOO.

>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.

Yes, I had meant to raise that question, but forgot. I see three possibilities:

(1) The header in the response MUST be exactly as in the article
(including all folding, comments, TABs, whatever).

(2) The header MAY/SHOULD/MUST be bowdlerized by contracting whitespace
(including folding) to a single SP, as in the OVER response.

(3) In addition to (2), the server MAY decline to respond in the case of
headers not included in the overview. But in that case what response code
should be sent?

Looking at the present text, the wording is even worse than I had
supposed. It says "The line consists of the article number, a US-ASCII
space, and then the contents of the header (without the header name)". But
that is IMPOSSIBLE if the header is folded. So my option (1) is
inconsistent with the present wording. The model implementation seems to
implement (2). I could live with (3) (as a MAY - I would prefer servers to
behave as (2)).

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

Where?

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