ietf-nntp HDR

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

> 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".

"." is a valid character in mail header names.  The NNTP protocol to some
degree assumes a Usenet article format, but it doesn't have to be strictly
bound to it, and in particular gating arbitrary mail messages into an
NNTP-accessible spool without making them conform with stricter Usenet
rules is often useful.

":" has the advantage that it's definitely invalid in the header name.

However, I think this is still more complicated than adding an optional
header parameter to OVER.  The rule "if you want article headers, use HDR,
and if you want overview data, use OVER" seems much simpler to me.  I
suppose this falls down if we ever have metadata we want to make available
that isn't included in the overview database, though.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>