ietf-nntp Articles without message IDs

[Clive D. W. Feather]

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In message <yly92v5haw.fsf_-_ at windlord.stanford.edu>, Russ Allbery 
<rra at stanford.edu> writes
>The two alternatives as I see it are:
>
> 1. Go with Clive's text, quoted below,

In case anyone is worried about hurting my feelings, don't be. I'm quite 
happy for us to go either way on this, and to rewrite the text as 
necessary.

> 2. State that articles MUST have message IDs, but add a special exception
>    to the text of POST saying that articles offered via POST need not
>    have a message ID, but that in that case one will be added by the
>    server.

We don't even need to do that. We've got the concept that an article has 
a message-id, and therefore the server will need to create one. That 
doesn't have to be from a message ID header, and so this doesn't need to 
be called out.

At least, I think so; if we go this way, I'll look more carefully at the 
wording.

>Note at the beginning of the document this difference from
>    RFC 977.

Important point.

>Please take a moment to indicate your preference, and also if you find the
>alternative completely unacceptable, please state why.

I'd prefer the second option (requiring a message-ID), but not at the 
cost of breaking any implementation that the implementer is concerned 
about.

>>    This specification does not describe how the message-id of an
>>    article is determined.  Many servers will extract the message-id
>>    from the contents of a header with name "Message-ID", but this is
>>    not required by this document.  In particular, if the article does
>>    not contain such a header, the server MAY synthesise a message-id
>>    or MAY choose not to assign a message-id to that article (this will
>>    restrict the ways in which this article can be accessed by the
>>    client).
>
>Maybe "the server MAY synthesise a message-id and add it to the article
>headers following whatever article format specification is used for the
>articles it is serving" instead, to clear things up for OVER and to make
>behavior match existing practice.

I'm not sure about that. Elsewhen we said that servers should never be 
fiddling with article contents. At the least we should word it to allow 
the ID to either be added to the article or not.

>> * Does OVER return the message-id or the contents of the Message-ID header?
>The contents of the Message-ID header, I'd say.

Okay.

Do we want a standardised metadata item (":message-id" perhaps) for the 
ID, unadorned by any comments or other syntactic silliness? This would 
be something that servers could make available as well, but wouldn't be 
required to.

- -- 
Clive D.W. Feather     |  Internet Expert  | Work: <clive at demon.net>
Tel: +44 20 8371 1138  |  Demon Internet   | Home: <clive at davros.org>
Fax: +44 870 051 9937  |  Thus plc         | Web:  <http://www.davros.org>
Written on my laptop; please observe the Reply-To address

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