[ietf-nntp] :bytes metadata

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> Actually this is a key point. What do clients do with the :bytes value?
> I believe there's a consensus for "SHOULD equal the canonical size", but
> should we be making any of the following statements (yes, I know they're
> not all consistent with one another):

I think Andrew is arguing for us making the following two statements:

> * :bytes MUST be greater than the canonical size minus 999.
> * :bytes MUST be less than the wire size plus 999.

Andrew, is that right?  Is 999 reasonable?

He has the most practical experience with the issues raised and with how
clients react to them in practice, so I'm inclined to go with his
expertise here.  The only change I may argue for is s/wire size/canonical
size/ in the second statement as well and just saying "tough" to servers
who don't have easy access to the canonical size, but I don't have a
strong feeling about that.

It would be nice to really hammer down :bytes as the exact canonical
length of the article, but it sounds like we can't get there from here
(saying that in the standard and having major news farms ignore it is,
IMO, worse than not saying it), and there really isn't any compelling
implementation reason to hammer it down that tightly.

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