ietf-nntp Article concepts

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylllz4r4ox.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:
>> Charles Lindsey wrote:

>>> Am I right in supposing that the Message-ID header is the _only_ one
>>> that NNTP needs to parse and dissect in detail?

>> You mean other than Newsgroups: and Control: and X-PGP-Sig: ?

>NNTP, as a protocol, doesn't have to parse any headers.  A news server has
>to parse a lot of headers (at the very least, all of the headers in
>overview), but that's not something governed by the NNTP protocol.

Well it certainly has to parse them if the protocol is to function
correctly. You can hide the operation away behind an "oracle" if you like,
but the job still has to be done.

So AFAICS the parser (or the oracle) has to understand Message-ID, and I
think probably Newsgroups also.

But Control and X-PGP-Sig are certainly not needed for the pure NNTP
functionality.

-- 
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
Email: chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5