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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