[ietf-nntp] :bytes metadata

[Charles Lindsey]

In <20031218114438.GA75903 at finch-staff-1.thus.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>(2) Should dot-stuffing be counted?

>(3) Should the final '.' CRLF be counted?

>In other words, do we see :bytes as indicating the size of the article in
>"canonical" form, or the number of octets that will come down the line in
>response to ARTICLE?

>My inclination is to say that the answers to (2) and (3) are "no"; the
>value is a storage octet count rather than a wire octet count.

I agree. If I ask for the metadata size, and shortly thereafter retrieve
and store the full article, then I would feel cheated if the article
turned out to be other than as predicted.

>I'm not sure what to do about (1). I can think of four possible fixes:
>(A) Say that the value applies to the current session and note that, while
>    it SHOULD be constant across sessions, there are cases when it isn't.

And if I retrieve the article in the same session as I retrieved the
metadata, then presumably I am getting it from the same server in the
cluster. I.e., in one session, I should get a consistent view of what is
stored in the server. If this forces the implementor to keep me assigned
to a single server during a session, then so be it.

-- 
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