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

[Ken Murchison]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
> Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Right.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> No, they look at the overview response and see if it has a Newsgroups or a
> Keywords header in it.  If it doesn't, and they're needed for something,
> it falls back on some other approach or disables that optional feature.
> That's why all headers in overview other than the first 7 are required to
> include the name of the header as well as the value.

Ahh, right!  I forgot about :full.  Now I realize that there is a
redundancy here.  I don't see the point of having both OVERVIEW.FMT and
having full non-standard headers (rather than just bodies) in OVER.  We
should either dump OVERVIEW.FMT or only return header bodies in OVER --
it seems like the former is more feasible.

-- 
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