ietf-nntp HDR

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylu1u11fc3.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Well, making it work right either involves changing the articles to have
>accurate Lines headers and then returning that value or returning the
>Lines data out of overview.  Yes?  Does anyone think that the command
>should return the contents of the Lines header of the article when that
>data is inaccurate?

No, if there is a genuine Lines header in the article, then HDR should
return it (though it would be a foolish client that believed it).

The way out of this problem is to use some name other than Lines for the
"true" count, and build that other name into the specification of
OVERVIEW.FMT. I have suggested "linecount" (and also "bytecount") for this
purpose. I think this is better than ":Lines" as Clive proposed. Or, if
you want to make it quite certain it will never clash with a real header,
make it "line.count" and "byte.count".

Then you can say that "HDR line.count" and "HDR byte.count" are legitimate
commands (or a suitable response if servers which don't provide OVER don't
want to provide that functionality).


>> I'm just wary of special-case kludges like this.

>Yeah, me too.

Indeed. Anything that invloves a genuine Lines header (other than just
returning it as asked) is a kludge.

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