[ietf-nntp] Re: ietf-nntp Niggles

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
>>>>    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.

The discussion appears to have taken place in July 2002. If I'm
reading it correctly, we did settle on empty response for both empty header
and missing header.

<http://www.academ.com/pipermail/ietf-nntp/2002-July/002695.html>

There was also a suggestion that these could be distinguished by the
presence or absence of the space, or by a dash instead of a space. However,
there doesn't seem to have been any followup to either of those.

Okay, I've changed the text to read:

    If the information is available, it is returned as a multi-line
    response following the 225 response code and contains one line
!   for each article in the range that exists (note that unless the
    argument is a range including a dash, there will be at most one
    line but it will still be in multi-line format).  The line consists
    of the article number, a space, and then the contents of the header
    (without the header name or the colon and space that follow it) or
    metadata item.
[...]
    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
    but the header content portion of the line is empty (the space
    after the article number MAY be retained or omitted).  If any
    article number in the provided range does not exist in the group,
    no line for that article number is included in the output.

I believe the examples are correct.

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