ietf-nntp Standardization of LIST OVERVIEW.FMT

[Ken Murchison]

> [Q5] What approach do you think should be taken by the next NNTP standard?

After further thought, I think that the output of OVER should be fixed
to whatever set of header/meta-data is needed by a client to produce its
article list.  Any other headers can be fetched via HDR.  If a server
chooses to include more that just the standard stuff in its overview
cache/database, then it can be used to speed up the corresponding HDR
responses.  Given this, OVERVIEW.FMT is unnecessry, so I'd say remove
OVERVIEW.FMT.

The bottom line is that if clients can't depend on the output of
OVERVIEW.FMT being consistent and/or they don't change behavior based on
its output, then it is essentially useless.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp