[ietf-nntp] OVER message-id

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Tue Dec 23 07:01:32 PST 2003


Ken Murchison said:
>>>Anyway, given that OVER on message IDs is an innovation of this working
>>>group that we added based on a few people saying it would be useful rather
>>>than based on existing practice, and given the stage that we're at with
>>>this draft, I think we should just drop OVER on message IDs again and not
>>>spend a bunch of time on this.

>> Can I suggest that we make it optional instead? That way we don't lose the
>> work done on it and, far more importantly, we ensure that people handle the
>> subtleties (e.g. returning a message number of 0) in a consistent manner.
> 
> Again, are there any client authors out there?  Does anyone think that 
> this is useful?  If not, then I agree with Russ that this can be 
> removed.  Otherwise, making it optional would be easy to advertise by 
> tweaking the OVER capability, e.g.
> 
> OVER+       or
> OVER +MSGID

I wasn't even going to propose that. Simply say that the OVER <msgid> is
optional; it MAY return 501, but if not MUST behave as described.

>> How do we handle the HDR cases that Andrew mentioned?
>> 
>>     HDR Xref <message-id>
>>     HDR :lines <message-id>
>> 
>> If we're going to live with it then I suggest:
>> 
>> (1) We need text saying that you can get 503 with message-id even if the
>> header is available with article number.
>> (2) LIST HEADERS ought to distinguish these cases (e.g. by putting "-<>"
>> or "NOMSGID" in the output for those headers:

> I think this is getting too ugly.  I think allowing msgid for HDR should 
> be all or nothing, not per header per access method.  Either the server 
> supports HDR msgid for all of the same headers that it can access by 
> msgno, or it doesn't advertise the ability to fetch by msgid.

But unlike OVER, it's practical to provide a half-way house.

But thinking about it, LIST HEADERS for article number form and
LIST HEADERS MSGID for message-id form would be a better way to do this.

-- 
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