ietf-nntp HDR

[Ade Lovett]

On 01/04/02 23:06, "Russ Allbery" <rra at stanford.edu> wrote:
> And you're making a bad engineering decision by inlining data that's
> already available in an out-of-band form with guaranteed accuracy, as well
> as a second bad engineering decision of putting derived data into a header
> where it can get out of sync.  cf Content-Length instead of From as a
> delimiter in Unix mailbox format.

Obviously, you know more about my internal data structures than I do, so I
bow to your superior knowledge.

> Now that we've both stated our strongly-held opinions on this matter, can
> I point out that this is completely out of scope for the NNTP working
> group, that in practice Lines is *not* standardized, that your proposal
> was already shot down on USEFOR, and that regardless we cannot assume that
> your proposal has been implemented for the purposes of this standard?

Wrong.  So far, I see nothing in the HDR draft to say that the server MAY
refuse certain requests based on local policy (as exists in other commands).

The simple addition of, say:

    503 header <HEADER> not available for indexing purposes

As a possible response to HDR, in its various forms, would solve that.  Not
stunningly hard to do.

> There was a clear consensus on USEFOR against trying to standardize the
> Lines header, and a clear consensus in favor of declaring it obsolete.  In
> this case, given the people who were involved in that particular
> consensus, I'll be quite surprised if it's changed.

And there I was thinking that people were trying to put usefor behind them
as something to laugh nervously about in years to come.

-aDe