ietf-nntp HDR

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Thu Mar 8 03:20:35 PST 2001


In <20010307092626.F85255 at demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:


>Stan O. Barber said:

>>> * The text "See RFC-1036 for a list of valid header lines" remains
>>> confusing. Are we saying:
>>>   - the header must be one listed explicitly in RFC 1036, or
>>>   - 1036 gives examples of headers you might want to use
>>> ?
>> 
>> Good question. The reference implementation does not care, so it would be
>> consistent with the latter  clause.

>I think you should go for that unless anyone speaks up fairly quickly.

I would advise against any explicit mention of RFC1036 here, since its
days are numbered in any case.


>* Can the command restrict the header parameter (other than syntactically)
>or is any valid string permitted ? If I write:

>    HDR X-Haddock 1-

>am I guaranteed a 221 response, or can I be sent a 503 on the grounds that
>this server does not support the X-Haddock header for the HDR command.

I think either should be allowed. What I would say is that implementations
MAY limit the headers they allow (perhaps to those they keep in their
overview). I could provide a more precise wording if we agree that is what
we want to do.

A principal use of HDR is likely to be for implementing
killfiles-on-download (to save telephone bills for those of us who pay by
the second). It would be a very creative killfile that wanted to kill on
X-Haddock. but it might still be useful to catch some obscure spammer or
troller. But OTOH it would hardly be the Death of the Net if it failed to
work on some servers.


>By analogy with ARTICLE/HEAD/BODY/STAT I would say that it should *not* be
>necessary to select a newsgroup beforehand. I would suggest wording
>something like this (note, by the way, that the word "optional" in the
>existing text is wrong):

Being Devil's Advocate for a moment, I can see that it would be useful,
for implementors who wanted to use overview to implement HDR, to know
which newsgroup's overview file to use. But OTOH I would still prefer to
be able to use HDR without having the newsgroup fixed (for example, I
might want to use it on a list of <message-id>s returned by NEWNEWS).


>    If the second argument is a message-ID, then:
>    - If the article exists and includes that header, the server MUST
>      return a 221 code followed by a list containing exactly one line.
>      If the article is in the current group, the article number on that
>      line MUST be either zero or its actual number in that group; if the
            ^^^^
	    MAY
>      article is not in the current group or if no group is selected, the
>      article number MUST be zero.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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