ietf-nntp Where are we at?

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yl1yasjqc6.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:


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

>> 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.

>Why not simply try and see if you get a 503 response from HDR?

Yes, that is what one would have to do if one were patching up an existing
feature like XHDR, but here we start with a clean slate, so why not do the
job properly? In any case, Stan has carefully built the 'parameters'
feature into the LIST EXTENSIONS command, so why not use it?

Maybe I will propose some text.

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