ietf-nntp Draft 17 pre-2

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Fri Feb 28 03:37:35 PST 2003


In <UFKrQ1F1XkX+EwaY at on-the-train.demon.co.uk> "Clive D. W. Feather" <clive at on-the-train.demon.co.uk> writes:

>In message <yladgkruka.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu>, Russ Allbery 
><rra at stanford.edu> writes
>>I think we should bypass this entire debate and just not standardize LIST
>>OVERVIEW.FMT at all.  The information that it provides isn't very useful,
>>and worse is deceptively useful (in other words, it looks like it's more
>>useful than it actually is).

>It's the only way to find out all of what is in the overview database - 
>using OVER on any given article doesn't tell you that, it only tells you 
>what fields are in that article. So it does have some use.

Suppose some implementation decides to incldue the Foo:, Bar: and Baz:
headers in the overviews (in addition to the 7 obligatory ones).

Is there currently anything to stop it including those three headers (if
and when they are present) in a different order for different articles?

Or, if the OVERVIEW.FMT said they occurred in a particular order, would
the implementation be obliged to present them in that order?

And if, for some article, only the Bar: header appears, how can you tell
from the overview alone which headers were being described as 'absent'?

And Russ said the OVERVIEW.FMT might keep changing its mind as to what
headers were to be overviewed. But is that a realistic prospect, or just a
theoretical possibility that could reasonably be ignored?

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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