ietf-nntp HDR

[Ade Lovett]

On 01/07/02 04:10, "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> wrote:
> Making one command require another one to be used first is a bad idea
> unless it can be justified in contextual terms. Requiring GROUP before NEXT
> makes sense. Requring LIST OVERVIEW.FMT before HDR doesn't. What are you
> going to do if the client doesn't bother ? Reject it for being awkward ?

Then change it to a SHOULD (and be prepared to deal with the consequences if
it doesn't, asks for something that¹s not in the indexed headers, and gets a
nice 5xx response code).

Indeed, it seems that most clients out there simply assume that the overview
is going to be in NOV format, when that is not necessarily guaranteed to be
the case.  Take a test server, swap the order of Subject and MessageID, make
sure that XOVER (or OVER) works in that it returns headers in the order as
specified by LIST OVERVIEW.FMT, and see how badly clients break.  It's
rather educational.

-aDe