ietf-nntp Where are we at?

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylbsa3w47k.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:


>So... where are we at with this standard?  It seems like we're overdue for
>another draft.

>I sent out draft text for HDR and haven't heard anything at all back about
>it, so I assume that it's fine, although Charles just said he had some
>issue that he hasn't had time to write up yet.  I know that people wanted
>to have namespaces in it to get things like the article byte count, and
>I'm happy to incorporate that into my proposal if someone writes the
>language.

An issue with the HDR command is that some implementations allow it to
work with any header, and others allow it to work only with a restricted
set of headers (usually the ones in the overview).

I don't think we can alter that situation, but I would like the LIST
EXTENSIONS to be able to indicate which headers it could cope with, by
allowing a parameter in its response, e.g.
    [S] HDR ALL
    [S] HDR AS_OVERVIEW
    [S] HDR header1,header2,header3

Then a smart client that wanted to find all occurrences of the X-FOOBAR
header could use the response to the LIST EXTENSIONS to determine whether
X-FOOBAR would work with HDR, and if not it could automatically fall back
to calling the HEAD command on every article.

I had hoped to write that up as an extension to Russ's text, but lack of
time has prevented it.

The same applies to the namespaces for byte count and lines. Moreover, if
we do something there, it could have a knock on effect in the OVER
command.

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