ietf-nntp Article concepts

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

> Be careful about that 'space' after the colon. It is not obligatory in
> RFC 2822, and one day our arms may be twisted to allow it to be omitted
> in Usefor (I would rather it were made obligatory in 2822bis, but that
> is beyond our control).

I included the space in my proposed wording intentionally, since if you
read through the descriptions of various commands, you'll find that our
current standard assumes that it will always be there.  There are various
references to it in, for example, the OVER and HDR descriptions.

Those descriptions could potentially be rewritten to not make that
assumption, but I'm not sure if it's worth it.

>>   OUTSTANDING ISSUE

>>      I would much prefer us to simply say there MUST be exactly one ID,
>>      but that negates the existing text which says "<0>" MUST be used
>>      if there is no message-id header line.

> Yes, that is an exceedingly peculiar line in the present draft. How can
> it ever come about?

It comes about if you're serving out messages without a message ID, but I
don't really see any need for NNTP to allow for that possibility.  I think
that text was in there for as long as I've been participating in this
working group, so I don't know where it came from originally.

> 1. Any article stored by the server MUST have exactly one Message-ID
> header.

Too much article format stuff.  I like the way that Clive handled this,
and I think that all we additionally have to say is that any article
stored by the server MUST be associated with a message ID and then
eliminate the <0> stuff.

> 2. If an article arrives without one by POST, the server MUST generate
> one before storing it.

I would dearly like to not get involved in the responsibilities of an
injecting agent and instead defer them to USEFOR.  Can we avoid getting
into this?  Right now, the description of POST leaves all these things to
a component outside the scope of the NNTP standard, and I think this is
the right way to go here.  Otherwise, we're going to have to suck in
basically the entire responsibilities of an injecting agent section from
the USEFOR document.

> But now you have to worry about comments and WSP both before and after
> the <...> (Usefor currently disallows these, but RFC 2822 does not).

No, you don't; parsing of the header field is outside the scope of the
NNTP protocol.  From the NNTP perspective, the server takes the news
article, consults an oracle, and discovers its message ID.  The details of
how that happens can be deferred to the relevant article standard.

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