ietf-nntp Summary/analysis of LIST OVERVIEW.FMT responses

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Fri Apr 18 13:09:57 PDT 2003


Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:

> Based on the fact that of the clients that actually used OVERVIEW.FMT,
> they only used it to test for XOVER and/or check for the presence of
> Xref, I propose that LIST OVERVIEW.FMT should be dropped from the new
> base spec and that OVER should be standardized to return the following
> fixed set of items:

>       article number
>       "Subject" header
>       "From" header
>       "Date" header
>       "Message-ID" header
>       "References" header
>       :bytes metadata item
>       :lines metadata item
>       "Xref" header		(just the contents, NOT :full)

I thought a lot about this approach, but the difficulty with it comes in
with how a server would implement it in the face of an existing XOVER
implementation.  People actively use additional overview fields
(Newsgroups and Keywords being the most common) for some applications;
they just don't use LIST OVERVIEW.FMT to figure out that they're there.

While telling them to switch to HDR isn't a bad idea, servers that want to
support those clients have to keep supporting XOVER until they all switch.
But OVER wouldn't allow inclusion of those extra fields, which now makes
implementing OVER quite a bit more difficult.  (Similarly, dropping :full
from Xref causes problems for transitioning server software.)

Otherwise, yes, I'd definitely agree with you.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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