ietf-nntp Re: LIST HEADERS inconsistency issue

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> I asked:
>>> So do we change LIST HEADERS to match the above (that is, HDR MAY work
>>> for headers not listed by LIST HEADERS), or do we change both LIST
>>> OVERVIEW.FMT and LIST HEADERS to provide some way of saying "some
>>> articles have this but not all"?

> and Russ replied:
>> LIST HEADERS and HDR are a slightly different case from overview because
>> HDR has an unambiguous return code indicating "this header isn't in the
>> database" that can't be mistaken for "this article doesn't have that
>> header."  However, if someone goes HDR content-type 1- and some of those
>> articles have the Content-Type header in their database and some don't,
>> I'm not sure how to respond to that.  I think the server would have to
>> reject the command.  So maybe that resolves to the same issue.

> I think that rejection would need to be explicit in the specification;
> it's not the obvious thing to do.

I think rejection is the easiest and cleanest thing to do; does anyone
object to just doing that?  In other words, say that HDR must reject the
command unless information about that header (its value or its
nonexistence) is available for all articles in the specified range.

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