[NNTP] Snapshot 6

Ken Murchison ken at oceana.com
Thu Jan 6 10:09:11 PST 2005


Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

> Okay, snapshot 6 is available in the usual place:
> 
> <http://www.davros.org/nntp-texts/draft25.pre-6.txt>
> <http://www.davros.org/nntp-texts/draft25.pre-6.html>

Comments based mostly on the changes since pre-5.

3.2.2:

Since LISTGROUP, OVER and HDR have become optional capabilities rather 
than extensions (which I'm fine with), I'd like to see some kind of 
uniformity with the way that optional reader commands are advertised. 
We have LISTGROUP, OVER and HDR advertised with their own capabilities, 
yet POST is an argument to READER.  Obviously OVER needs to be a 
separate capability because it has its own argument (unless we tweak 
syntax), but LISTGROUP and HDR could simply be additional arguments to 
READER.

Similarly, if we change the IHAVE capability back to TRANSIT, then the 
STREAMING extension could simply be a STREAMING argument to TRANSIT 
rather than its own capability.

However, for simplicity and consistency it probably makes more sense to 
just make POST its own capability.  Having said all that, I won't argue 
strenuously for any changes.


3.3.5:

- The meaning of IHAVE should probably just say "IHAVE command 
available" rather than "Transit commands available".

- The meaning of SASL should probably say "Supported SASL mechanisms" 
rather than "SASL capabilities".


3.4.2:

Objection to "MUST advertise the READER capability with the -MODE-READER 
modifier" noted in another thread.


5.2.3:

Second example advertises LIST HEADERS but not HDR, as I feared might 
happen in real implementations.  I'm going to renew my concern over 
having two capabilities for a single command (HDR & LIST HEADERS, READER 
& LIST ACTIVE, etc), but I'll defer to the consensus.


6.3.1.1:

Should the indicating capability be "READER POST" instead of just "POST"?


9:

Not really a problem with the base doc, but with the STREAMING doc. 
Section 9 states that <command-continuation> follows a server 
<response>.  We use <command-continuation> with the TAKETHIS command, 
but this is clearly incorrect because we don't get a server response 
before we send the article.  I'm guessing that the syntax for TAKETHIS 
should probably be something along the lines of:

takethis-command = "TAKETHIS" WS message-id EOL encoded-article


However, since <command-line> includes EOL, the above would be broken 
because we'd be ending with  "." CRLF *(SP / TAB) CRLF

The closest we can get with the current syntax elements is:

takethis-command = "TAKETHIS" WS message-id EOL content-lines "."


but this still allows *(SP / TAB) after the "." which isn't correct.

Thoughts?  Perhaps the easiest thing to do is to adjust the sequence 
listed in 9.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp



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