ietf-nntp LIST OVERVIEW.FMT

[Russ Allbery]

Here's what I think we should do about LIST OVERVIEW.FMT.

I'll post to news.software.readers and news.software.nntp asking people
there if (a) their software implements the command, either on the server
side or on the reader side, (b) for readers, what they expect the result
to mean if they use it, (c) for servers, what the meaning of the response
is, and (d) whether they think we should keep the command.

I personally think we should not standardize it because the contents of
the database can change, which means that it's very unclear to me what
utility the result has.  I think we have three basic options:

 * Standardize the command as written in our draft, or omitting the option
   of presenting Lines and Bytes using the new metadata syntax, with the
   warning that it's just what's going into the database now.

 * Standardize the command, making it optional and requiring that the
   information be accurate for the entire overview database if it is
   implemented.  But this still doesn't appear to be sufficient to allow
   clients to draw conclusions like "Content-Type is in overview.fmt,
   there's no Content-Type in the overview data for this article,
   therefore the article doesn't have Content-Type" since the server
   administrator may run some command that adds Content-Type globally to
   the whole overview database between the time that the client sends
   LIST OVERVIEW.FMT and the time that it retrieves that overview
   information.

 * Don't standardize the command.

We can then see what people in the newsgroups say and if they come up with
any good reasons why they're using or want to use this command and go from
there.

If anyone disagrees with this approach, please let me know.  Similarly, if
anyone has an explanation of what they would use this command for in
practice, please do speak up.

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