ietf-nntp Re: OVER extension

[Charles Lindsey]

In <20020102100154.C72355 at demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>There was a suggestion that OVER could take a message-ID. This would need
>to be optional; to allow it, include the lines prefixed with $, while to
>forbid it exclude those lines.

I raised that issue because it looked like an inconsistency. But, having
heard the replies, I think it would be better to leave it out.

>  9.5.2 The OVER Extension


>  For a successful response, the returned information consists of one line
>  per article, sorted in numerical order of article number. Each line
>  consists of a number of fields separated by an US-ASCII TAB character.
>  A field may be empty (in which case there will be two adjacent US-ASCII
>  tabs), and a sequence of trailing US-ASCII tabs may be omitted.
                                              ^^^^
					      TABs

But I don't think trailing TABs can ever arise as you have defined things.
Certainly they do not arise from empty non-obligatory fields. If you want
to be able to omit trailing empty non-obligatory fields, then you need an
explict rule to say so.


>  The byte count and line count MUST be decimal integers. They MUST
>  count the entire article, both header and body. The line count is
>  the number of US-ASCII CRLF pairs, each of which counts as two bytes.
>  These values MUST be returned; the corresponding fields MUST NOT be
>  empty.

You need to include a warning against believing any genuine Lines header
that may be present.

>[Possible addition]
>? Alternatively, a server MAY treat a lone LF - both here and in the line
>? count - as if it were CRLF.

No, I think I take the view that lone CR and LF are not valid anywhere in
the NNTP stream.


>  9.5.2.1.2 Examples


>          [S] 200 NNTP Service Ready
>          [C] GROUP misc.test
>          [S] 211 1234 3000234 3002322 misc.test
>          [C] OVER
>          [S] 224 Overview information follows
>          [S] 3000234|I am just a test article|nobody at nowhere.to
>          ++  (Demo User)|6 Oct 1998 04:38:40 -0500|<45223423 at to.to>||
>          ++  4822|37|X-NNTP-Posting-Host: user.nowhere.to
>          [S] .

I would advise against using X-NNTP-Posting-Host as your example because
a) The commonly used header is actually NNTP-Posting-Host (no 'X-'), and
b) Usefor is trying to phase out that usage anyway.

Xref would be a good example to use or, if you want one that may sometimes
be absent, you could try Distribution, or Sender, or Content-Type.

>     Example of a successful retrieval of overview information for a
>     range of articles


>     Note the missing "References" header in the first two lines, the
>     missing trailing field in the last line, and that there are only
>     results for those articles that still exist.

See my remark above if you want to omit trailing fields.


>  9.5.2.2 LIST OVERVIEW.FMT


>  This command MUST generate the same results throughout a session.

Why?


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