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

[Ken Murchison]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
> Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:
> > Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
> >> Why would the client have to assume anything at all?  That's why all
> >> the fields after the first seven are labelled.  It's quite standard;
> >> it's part of the original overview specification.
> 
> > I agree.  What I was referring to was what you said in your previous
> > post: "they just don't use LIST OVERVIEW.FMT to figure out that they're
> > there"
> 
> I'm sorry, I really don't understand what you're getting at.  I stand by
> both that statement and the statement above.

Maybe I don't either :)  Unless I misunderstood, you said that some
clients use Newsgroups and Keywords from the XOVER response, but they
don't use LIST OVERVIEW.FMT to verify that they will be in the XOVER
response.

If that is the case, then they are making the assumption that the
headers will be present (since they are not part of the standard 7) and
in the order that they expect.


> Really, from the client perspective, it's functionally identical.  The
> thing is, XOVER works.  If it weren't for the X, we probably wouldn't have
> this discussion at all and would just standardize it as-is, because the
> amount of brokenness is totally not worth making any changes.

OK, so why are we having this discussion?  It sounds like it is a
forgone conclusion that OVER will be a carbon copy of XOVER and LIST
OVERVIEW.FMT will remain as-is.  I'm fine with this, but I thought we
were trying to clean things up a bit?  If backwards compatibility is
key, then we'll just leave things alone.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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