ietf-nntp Currently outstanding issues

Jeffrey M. Vinocur jeff at litech.org
Fri May 2 13:35:05 PDT 2003


On Fri, 2 May 2003, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

>    Keywords MUST be at least three characters and MUST NOT exceed 12
>    characters. Command lines MUST NOT exceed 512 octets, which includes
>    the terminating CRLF pair. The arguments MUST NOT exceed 497 octets.
> +  A server MAY relax these limits for commands defined in an extension.

Ah, much clearer.


Query:  why can't we permit an extension to indicate the server supports 
longer lines for existing commands?  (It seems like this could be useful, 
and wouldn't break anything; clients not checking for that extension would 
stick to the 512-octet limit, and smarter clients would only do so if the 
server indicated that was acceptable.)

Query:  do we want to specify the behavior of the server if a over-long
command is received?  (In particular, of the four possible behaviors that
come to mind -- (1) handle the long line, (2) return a syntax error, (3)
treat the first 512 octets as a command ignoring the remainder, and (4) 
treat the first 512 octets as a command and then treat the remainder as 
the next command -- I'd like to require the server to do one of the first 
two, and not one of the last two.)


> >   - new client, old server -- the client can use MODE STREAM without
> >     checking LIST EXTENSIONS first, just like now
> 
> But if it *does* check, it will get an error!

Possible -- is that icky enough to justify another roundtrip?  (If so,
fine by me.)


> The table is generated automatically by the xml2rfc package. I've stepped
> it down to only include the first three levels; this means that some
> commands have the Usage/Description/Examples structure shown and some
> don't. I could fix that, but only at the cost of adding unnecessary
> subsections.

(Well, you could edit it by hand afterwards.)


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org




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