ietf-nntp OVER extension

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Andrew Gierth said:
>  Clive>   X.X.2 The byte:count metadata item
> 
>  Clive>   The byte:count metadata item for an article is a decimal
>  Clive>   integer.  It is the number of bytes in the entire article -
>  Clive>   both headers, body, and separating blank line - except that
>  Clive>   the US-ASCII CRLF at the end of each line counts as one
>  Clive>   byte, not two.
> 
> Ew. No. Ideally, it should specify the byte count counting all CRLF
> pairs as two bytes.

That was my proposal six months ago, but everyone told me that existing
practice is to treat CRLF as one byte.

> There needs to be a warning here that the byte
> count may not correspond exactly to the number of octets returned by
> an ARTICLE command, because in some server designs that simply isn't
> predictable in advance; but that should be the target aimed for.

We need to agree what is and isn't acceptable as a "byte count". For
example, the above text could be changed to "... each line MAY be counted
as one byte instead of two", which would allow the sensible thing while
still permitting existing practice.

Um, I can see the number of octets being different, because of dot
stuffing, but I'm not sure I get the "isn't predictable" bit. Isn't the
whole reason this is in the overview to *make* it predictable ?

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:  +44 20 8371 1138
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