ietf-nntp Currently outstanding issues

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>> The reason to allow folding immediately after the header name, since
>> this is used in practice and lack of support for this in NNTP causes
>> problems with, e.g., mail to news gateways.

> I don't quite see how. If some mail has folding immediately after the
> header, and it is gatewayed to news, then it needs to be unfolded to
> make it legal

It doesn't if we allow folding before the space after the colon.  That's
my point.  I regularly got messages rejected from my mail to news gateway
before I added some unfolding to that gateway code, and I don't feel like
I should have had to write that code.  The news server was capable of
handling it with a slight improvement to its header folding logic.

Note that if NNTP says that it's legal and USEFOR says that it's not, we
have an excellent should accept but should not generate situation set up,
which is, I think, the right setup to push server implementors towards a
better implementation.

It doesn't really matter, though, and I don't want my argument of the
point to make it sound more important than it is.  It's very much a corner
case, and if the way to get consensus is to leave it alone, that's fine
with me.  I'd rather have more opinions before making that decision,
though.

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