ietf-nntp Article concepts

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Tue Mar 25 05:50:09 PST 2003


In <20030324221102.GD19264 at finch-staff-1.thus.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>Russ Allbery said:

>And, as you pointed out to me, we can't assume that an NNTP server is only
>handling USEFOR-conformant articles. Can we safely assume that no such
>article will ever arrive?

I don't think we go out of our way to make the NNTP protocol useful for
anything other than news (look at the mess IMAP got into when it strayed
from its original Email brief :-( ).

So you should make that assumption wherever it would distort our standard
if you did not make it.


>> 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.

>It's in 977.

And it's even implemented in places. But is it ever _useful_ in the Real
World (TM)?

>> 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.

>Right. And the oracle is allowed to say "none", in which case "<0>" comes
>into play.

No, it would be better to say "invalid article", with appropriate 5xx
response (except for POST, when you (or the oracle) generates one).


><FX: delay>

>Okay, fitting that into the text was easy:

>   Each article SHOULD have a message-id.  Two articles processed by

No. Make that a MUST. Then all sorts of problems just go away (and it
would just be reaffirming current practice, anyway).


>The issues are then as follows:
>* What text does POST need to say where the "same message-id" is?
>* NEWNEWS needs to say that articles without message-ids are omitted.
>* Does OVER return the message-id or the contents of the Message-ID header?

Exactly. These are all problems that should never be allowed to arise in
the first place.

-- 
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



More information about the ietf-nntp mailing list