ietf-nntp Where are we at?

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon Jul 1 09:53:18 PDT 2002


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

> Because it's messy to have to invent a test case just to find whether
> some feature is supported. I am thinking of the case where the client
> has a large list of things it wants to query using HDR,

I have a hard time imagining this scenario.  After you want more than a
few headers, it's quicker and more efficient to just download the article
headers with HEAD and do it yourself.  It's certainly preferred by the
news server administrator in most cases.

> We invented the LIST EXTENSION command precisely so that clients could
> plan ahead which strategies to use. It is there. Why not use it?

Because it's very complicated to specify this information in that format,
and involves potentially listing dozens of headers as arguments to the
extension, all for something that's likely to be almost never used since
for all normal operations just trying it and seeing if you get 503 is
easier and requires less parsing.

If this is the best reason available, I think I'm opposed.

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



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