ietf-nntp Where are we at?

[Russ Allbery]

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

> It is not likely that you will want to examine many headers, but you may
> want to examine some particular header for a very large number of
> articles. For example, you are filtering against some particular spam or
> hipcrime flood and you have discovered that there is some feature in
> some obscure header that positivley identifies the target articles. You
> would prefer to use a HDR command rather than download headers for all
> articles in the group.

In that case, it is trivial to try the first HDR and fall back on other
mechanisms if it fails, so this is a bad example for where this would be
useful.

> My proposal is not limited to the particular syntax I gave. Even if you
> limit the possible parameters to the two common cases of "all" and
> "overview" you will get most of the benefit.

You cannot simplify it to that because you would be misrepresenting the
server.  There are servers for which neither "all" nor "overview" are
true.  Which means that there are both specialized tokens and header
names, and a potentially unlimited number of header names, that you then
have to parse into some data structure to answer your question.  Ick.
Just asking and checking the return code is significantly simpler.

> But specifying the parameter is no burden on the implementor because,
> for any given server, it is just a constant string that the implementor
> has to write just once.

This is not correct.

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