[ietf-nntp] Re: ietf-nntp Niggles

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>>>    If the requested header is not present in the article or if it is
>>>    present but empty, a line for that article is included in the output

>> We had a long conversation about this and I believe the above is correct.

Clive, I'm pretty sure my memory of this discussion is accurate, although
if someone wants to troll through the archives, that would be welcome
confirmation.  We did establish consensus on this, though; the draft just
doesn't fully represent that consensus.

> Hmmm! WHat does XHDR do?

Nothing sensibly uniform.  That came up in our previous discussion.

> In RFC 2980 I find:

>    Some implementations will return "(none)" followed by a period on a
>    line by itself if no headers match in any of the articles searched.

This is some other odd problem unrelated to this one, and is obviously
broken.

> And what Stan Barber's reference implementation does is

> XHDR References 2735-
> 221 References fields follow
> 2735 <200310282052.h9SKqRn00642 at clerew.man.ac.uk>
> 2736 <200310282052.h9SKqRn00642 at clerew.man.ac.uk> <87d6cgsm3t.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu>
> 2737 (none)

This is a common current implementation, but is obviously a bad idea since
there's no way to distinguish between a missing header and a header that
actually has the value "(none)" (significant for Subject).  This came up
in our previous discussion.

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